You have obviously not looked up my CV, like some here have done.
No I did not grow up on a Cattle Station in the Aussie Outback, with miles to the nearest neighbour, not to mention school, shops, or post office.
BTW;: Singapore may be an Expat paradise, but majority of the “Captains of Industries” are local and many of the Expats living in Singapore are working for them.
Expats comes from all over the world, but lots of those in high positions are Asians.
This applies in both local and foreign owned companies, especially in Shipping, but also in companies involved in the oil and gas industry.
It dismays me that you think that New Zealanders have to be told what a joke is but we seem to be moving off topic.
Partly my fault.
Mea Culpa
I will make a list but I seriously doubt the majority of the large businesses are Singaporean owned and run, Singapore majority of large companies are foreign with foreign staff especially in technology and more so in Oil n Gas
Most expats I know work for foreign companies, many of which have contracts with the Gov.
here’s a couple of basket cases run by locals
Shipping/Offshore
Pil- gone - billions oweing
Ezra - gone - billions oweing
Swiber - almost gone
NOL - rescued by overseas shipping company after years of loses
Oil trading:
Hin Leong Trading going to be gone- billions owning.
ZenRock - going - only millions gone
Commodities
Agritrade International Pte,
Only got worse since this headline as gov shipyards ( caught up in the Brazillian Car wash scandal) have been added.
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/banking-finance/dbss-s17b-exposure-to-og-sector-in-focus
For those not familiar with Singapore Inc, if your a Singapore Chinese owned company the local GOV owned bank will just keep lending to you forever, hence the bankruptcies are spectacular and no assets at the end of them.
Swibers last handout from DBS bank (gov owned with foreign boss as even the Gov recognises growing up in Singapore you dont get the exposure and skills to run a large corporation) was $60million facilitation to start a project that was based on a fake press release and no contract started.
Nobody in prison.Directors got a few $1000 fines…
Just where are those Singaporean “captains of industry” running global conglomerates?
A common comment you get in Singapore, and just got it from very senior person in Ikea ( new in town) says to me how come Ikea in Thailand run by locals but there are no Singaporeans in senior management in the Singapore organization?
Perhaps it looked better in 1965?
Time to split the thread to “educating OM on Singapore”
Back to the question: Will China and Russia attack Hawaii? Or, the bigger question: What to do about a giant Asian superpower bent on world conquest?
We’ve seen this movie before.
1960s Version: “The Soviet Menace”. Plot: The Soviet Union is an unstoppable Asian superpower, gobbling up countries. Too big to fail. The Soviets are spartans warriors, led by strong he-men. The Soviets are the world’s technological leaders, with the world’s largest merchant marine. Nothing can stop them. [Cue evil laughter]. The USA? A divided has-been country, beset with race riots, and crippled by stoned hippies and Black Panthers.
1980 remake: “The Rise of Japan”. Plot: Japan will soon become the world’s largest economy. Japan is the world’s technologic leader, the world’s shipbuilder. Japan doesn’t need a military, because it is buying up all the American real estate and businesses. Soon, we will all be working for the Japanese. Japan is too big to fail. Their triumph is inevitable. The 21st Century will be the Japanese Century. The USA? A has-been country, divided by race riots, crippled by MTV-watching crackheads, and black men with pants sagging down their butts.
2000 remake: “The Muslim Caliphate”. This was a war movie. (We win.)
2020 remake: “China: The Revenge of Xi”. Plot? I’ve seen it before…
Like you, sometimes when thinking about the China/US competition I remember our old nemesis that I grew up with, the Soviet Union. It’s been reported that only a couple of analysts predicted that empires fall a year or two before & the tens of thousands others were wrong. That’s reassuring but I also have to acknowledge it could be our surprise rapid decline that isn’t being properly predicted. Even last year, Jan/Feb when a once in a lifetime crippling pandemic was creeping across the globe our media, celebrities & most politicians were 100% occupied with a fruitless impeachment circus. A year from now the CCP or the US could be a shadow of their former selves. If it is the US who takes a nose dive an attack on Hawaii from Russia or China wouldn’t be that farfetched.
where did the news come from that Russia wants to attack Hawaii?
The first post has a link from Yahoo News that says the joint Russia/China military exercise off of Hawaii is possibly a disguise to attack Hawaii according to a top Japanese defense official.
Sorry Pebble, I value your opinion on many things. I have to respectfully disagree regarding attacks on Hawaii by any nation. Everyone is just flexing their muscles and showing off their stuff in the toybox, USA included. Media loves it. No leader is stupid enough to even entertain the idea. Even North Korea.
For now, I agree with you. But if we had another pandemic where the US had a 10-20% mortality rate instead of the 1.8% of Covid19 it would change the pieces on the board a great deal. Best to be on our guard the best we can within reasonable means.
Concerning North Korea, apparently it’s only 1 man making decisions to suit himself. It is a lot easier to predict the actions & needs of a nation compared to predicting the whims of a dictator whose only concern is himself. NK remains a wildcard.
RE: Resiliency of the USA
Those who haven’t lived through the1960s-1980s don’t understand how tumultuous the period was. During the sixties, society was bitterly divided between war Hawks and Doves, and white and black. Rioting rocked the country for years. Students were gunned down by soldiers. Young men fled to Canada to avoid the draft. Then, the USA lost a war to puny, backwards Vietnam. Complete humiliation for us on the world stage.
In the 1970s the president was disgraced. After a bitter spectacle in the press he was forced to resign, rather than face the ignominy of impeachment. The rioting stopped in the mid-seventies but then came the Gas Crisis. OPEC thumbed their nose at the USA: we’re in charge of the world’s energy, and so the world economy, they thought. The U.S. economy went into recession, then, much worse, endured stagflation. All those Springsteen songs about factories closing down? They are about the 1970s, not today’s problems.
The problems the USA faces now are not new. Economic competitors are not new. Civil unrest and political brouhahas are not new. Through all the tumult, through the Soviet Menace, the Rise of Japan (twice mind you), the USA is still on top. The past is usually the future. Not always, but usually. Anyone taking on the USA needs to keep that in mind.
The interesting question is, Why does the perennially weak, divided, USA always end up on top?
Freighterman1, we are not so far apart on this subject kind sir.
There was an interesting article in The Economist where they used the “Big Mac” index to compare the size of the Chinese economy with the American economy instead of the usual methods.
By that measure the Chinese economy is 43% bigger than the USA. That is a situation that America has never faced since the late 19th century when Britain manufactured more than 50% of the world’s goods.
From Statista:
Purchasing power parity (PPP) is the idea that items should cost the same in different countries, based on the exchange rate at that time. This relationship does not hold in practice. Factors like tax rates, wage regulations, whether components need to be imported, and the level of market competition all contribute to price variations between countries. The Big Mac index does measure this basic point – that one U.S. dollar can buy more in some countries than others. There are more accurate ways to measure differences in PPP though, which convert a larger range of products into their dollar price. Adjusting for PPP can have a massive effect on how we understand a country’s economy. The country with the largest GDP adjusted for PPP is China, but when looking at the unadjusted GDP of different countries the U.S. has the largest economy.
There are plenty of immigrants who are connected to their former nations, and who are aware of what’s going on outside of the US. They don’t rely on US media for their information.
The difference today is that most production is overseas.
This may not work out as in the past much longer. The USA has outsourced most of its critical manufacturing. Not much left for the US economy but the rentiers. Just look at the economic statistics for the USA. It is mainly “service”. Bankers, financiers plus hotel maids, lawn service etc
you can choose the government and are free to think and relatively wealthy country with lots of natural resources.
Thats what you need for clear thinking and innovation and industry in the USA has had lots of that for over 120 years
check $ output per person and total income divided by the population.
USA at the top of that list
Its all about productivity.
The situation between Japan and the USA in the 1980s was about the same as between China and the USA now. I heard the same exact arguments in the 1980s about how the USA had lost its industrial base. And yet the Japanese economy crashed in the 1990s and never recovered.
The major reasons:
- Japan’s success was based on cheap labor. But wages rose. They lost that advantage to …China.
- Demographics. As the Japanese became more educated, their birthrate slowed. Classic demographics. No immigration. Hard to grow an economy with fewer and fewer people.
China is staring these same factors straight in the face right now. More education, therefore the birth rate is declining. There is an inexorable desire for rising wages. Meanwhile, India is hungry for more jobs. India has big social problems, but so did China at one time, and China straightened them out. Once India gets its shit together, China’s economy will tank.
From Newsweek, Feb. of this year:
Last year, China closed its GDP gap with the U.S., expanding its economy by 2.3 percent to $14.7 trillion. This is only $6.2 trillion less than the American GDP, down from $7.1 trillion in 2019, CNBC reported…
…Alicia García-Herrero, chief economist for the Asia-Pacific at French investment bank Natixis, agreed China could continue to lag behind the U.S. economy.
“This is possible since average real GDP growth in China could well hover around 2.5 percent in 2035 and onwards, which will mean that China would stop converging with the U.S. and maybe even diverging,” she told Newsweek .
“The fall of the labor force is one reason but also decelerating productivity,” she added.
A part of the U.S, manufacturing economy that is mis-categorized IMO is house construction. The houses may be on American soil, but the mortgages are held by banks and sovereign state funds from all around the world. Mortgages are divided up into tranches and sold like as commodities. Also, foreign buyers directly buy American houses as investments. A stable place to put money. A steady return on investment.
Houses/apartments/condos are some of our biggest exports. An industry that can never be outsourced. The jobs created are high-paying, and homeowners love the inflated, steadily rising prices.
There are negative consequences:
At one time, the price of a new house was based on how much locals could pay, and on the reserves of the local savings-and-loan who held the mortgage. But when a mortgage becomes a worldwide commodity, and foreigners are buying houses as investments they don’t intend to live in, the price of housing increases above the scale of the local economy.
Foreign investment is one of the reasons cities like Seattle and San Francisco have such high house prices. But the children of the locals often have to move to another city, because they can’t afford housing.
Another consequence: homelessness. Seattle has no slums or trailer parks. They were all bulldozed to make way for new housing, to be “exported" to some degree as mortgages. But the people who lived in the slums are still here, living on the streets. Turns out that slums are a necessary part of any city. They are where you park those citizens who can’t get their shit together.
