What's your current headache?

To put the election in perspective I just came back from spending the weekend in rural Indiana. Pretty much bleed Red down there. Wonderful people across the board and was a not so subtle reminder that we're still just Americans and having emigrated from Canada 40 some years ago I'm still proud to be an American and will always be. I love my birth country and proud to be from there but it's not the Canada I left. In the same breath this isn't the same US that I moved to either.

Putting soap box away now.
 
Gordo said:
To put the election in perspective I just came back from spending the weekend in rural Indiana. Pretty much bleed Red down there. Wonderful people across the board and was a not so subtle reminder that we're still just Americans and having emigrated from Canada 40 some years ago I'm still proud to be an American and will always be. I love my birth country and proud to be from there but it's not the Canada I left. In the same breath this isn't the same US that I moved to either.

Putting soap box away now.
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I'm dealing with the anxiety by starting idiotic rumors. Did you hear Elon Musk is going to rename the country Xmerica and then claim he invented it?
 
Pauleo1214 said:
Regarding China’s growth outpacing the rest of the world, it’s worth noting that their success is domestic, not global.
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China has some serious economic problems, folks. And there's a lot of misinformation as well.

A huge % (roughly ~30%) of China's economy and growth in the last 2 decades came from real estate, and the unsecured loans owed by the various Chinese local governments now totals several trillions of US dollars. Average home/apartment prices in their major cities now often exceeds those in the US, even though their average income is a fraction of America's. Homes (and various "off the books" personal investment schemes tied to homes) were the main investment vehicle for the Chinese public for the last 20+ years. But now that home prices are declining, the investors and the government are both facing a major bust. Note that the major source of income for local governments was selling land to developers, but now those developers have overbuilt and have either gone bankrupt or are well on their way there. That local $ was what paid for building all that new infrastructure, and now that source has disappeared it is covered by huge loans that will be very difficult to pay back.

Also remember that official Chinese economic numbers are heavily manipulated.

One other comment: The idea that China "stole" all our manufacturing jobs is quite simplistic, and misses a very important issue. Yes, they grew their manufacturing basis enormously (yes, often via scandalous means), while we lost a lot of our manufacturing base. HOWEVER, ~90% of those US manufacturing jobs disappeared due to AUTOMATION, not due to China - and thus will NEVER return even if manufacturing somehow returns to the US. Just look at photos of an auto assembly line in the 1990s vs today, the number of workers is far fewer and the number of robots has exploded.
 
The huge internal economic problems China faces is why they are pushing exports even more aggressively than before, they have to recoup the money from outside. But in many industries, they have also overbuilt the production infrastructure. And the nationalist sentiments of Xi only add to the bonfire. It's a mess for the US and Europe, but especially so for China.
 
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