I am so very glad that you were able to get in on a ride along, trust me, you’ll enjoy it. The important part is that you’re going to get an intimate look at your future career, something that most people do NOT get a chance to do. So, have fun on your ride along. A few tips:
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Best Buy ISA

Savings

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mark lopez

Yes there is. If you buy capital assets with an RoI lower than your marginal rate of time-preference, then by definition, you have saved too much.

And I may not know much about the Horus Heresy, but I know that’s what it was.

The whole “underconsumption” theory is a mess of absurdiites – most of which go back long before Keynes.

The idea that the supply of credit must be expanded beyond real savings (contrary to Keynes – an expansion in the money supply is not “saving” or the “same as saving”) in order to serve the “needs of trade” or whatever, is also absurd – utterly absurd and incredibly harmful.

As for the Chinese fixing their exchange rate…….

Surely the vast American inflation (in the real sense of the word “inflation” i.e. the increase in the money supply) will solve this problem – although in a horrible way.

Unless the Chinese are also vastly inflating – and that leads us to the great void in economic knowledge, our knowledge of China.

Neither “broad money” (bank credit) or “narrow money” (the monetary base – notes and coins and so on) figures in China can be trusted – we know nothing (for sure) about what is going on.

To use an example from science fiction (both games and stories) the Chinese are as hard to read as the face of Horus.

He could be loyal to humanity – or he could have sold out to the powers of evil. His seeming order masking a soul under the control of the powers of Chaos (the opposite of anarchy as anoachocapitalists would understand that term) .

Of course in the stories (the background to 40k universe) it turns out that…………

This isn’t (merely) a gratuitous snipe at the Obama Administration and US policy, but there are plenty of pitfalls between here and a robust recovery, despite what the public are being told. Some of those risks are only becoming apparent to the public now – Sovereign debt, continuing unemployment (and the prospect of no relief in sight), continuing budgetary incontinence – you get the picture.

If I were the Chinese, I’d be buying exploration rights in developing countries, physical commodities where possible, and buying friends -with US Treasury paper wherever possible.

“Excessive savings” from the perspective of Chinese consumers. These are not voluntary savings, but coerced savings. Also I’d argue that any investment in US Treasury bonds is excessive because of their low RoI and high probability of default.

You have a point in that Chinese investors do not have total freedom to buy the assets that they want, and of course if they did, it would be interesting to know if they had bought other things besides US Treasuries or whatever. But when they were buying US T-bonds and the like, the yields on these things were relatively higher than now.

As for the default risk, it is certainly true that it exists, but again, that is not the picture when China began to buy such debt more than a decade ago. The risk of a US debt default or partial repudiation of its debt cannot be ruled out.

It is certainly true that liberalising China’s capital and investment flows would be a positive step for the world economy, which is why I regard Obama’s recent decision to sign off on protectionist moves against Chinese tire imports as irresponsible and dangerous.

In fact, the sheer amount of construction going on in China, especially the South and Eastern regions, gives me a very bad feeling, as though another construction/housing bubble ready to burst.

When I was in Hangzhou, I heard of obscenely high prices for condo buildings under construction, and the first thing I thought of was whether there were actually enough buyers for those flats.

I’m slowly developing a conviction that the China bubble will burst over the next three years. It won’t be pretty.

Oh that is commonly found in just about any English-language or Mandarin newspaper.

I have challenged the Taipei Times editorial team on this on two seperate occasions which both went unpublished. Just as they left unpublished my letters challenging them on Climategate. The cloth-eared pillocks.

Anyway, I am glad someone like Peter Schiff is around who at least stands a chance of actually being heard by a reasonably large audience of moderately wealthy people.