Comments by "yop yop" (@yopyop3241) on "Global Economic Growth Is Collapsing (Here's Why) || Peter Zeihan" video.

  1. I think Peter would recommend: 1. Move to Texas or a nearby-to-Texas state, 2. Find a job with a manufacturing company, preferably one in an energy-intensive industry, and 3. Learn Spanish.
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  2. Below replacement BIRTH rate. Additionally, lifespans have gotten a lot longer. In the short term, that additional factor allows population growth and working age population growth to continue. But in the long run, unless we come up with a way to increase lifespan and retirement age out to near infinity, eventually the population will age into mass retirement and start to shrink. We are hitting global advanced world mass retirement right now.
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  3. National-debt-to-GDP figures look good for China, but that’s just a number on a spreadsheet. What matters is what that number represents. For most countries, it’s the national government that is mostly responsible for key services like education, healthcare, the retirement safety net, and infrastructure. That’s the stuff that matters, and so the national government’s ability to provide that stuff in light of its debt situation is what matters. In the US, that’s actually incorrect. In the US, state and local governments are responsible for a lot of that stuff. But we’re still OK just using the US’s national debt numbers and ignoring state and local government debt because the US’s state and local governments are highly constrained by law against carrying significant debt. So mathematical precision demands that we consider the US’s state and local government debts, but since those values are constrained to be nearly zero, we can get away with just using the US national debt figure. In China, the situation is totally different. In China, the provincial and local governments are responsible for almost all of the stuff that matters. In addition, to pay for that stuff, the provincial and local governments have tallied up huge amounts of debt. So to understand China’s situation with respect to the stuff that matters (education, healthcare, retirement, infrastructure, etc.), we can’t just focus on China’s national debt, because that’s not the number that matters. The 350% number that Peter gives is a reasonable estimate, but the reality is that no one really knows. The Chinese provincial and local governments have purposely used very opaque borrowing methods to disguise how much debt they have built up (and how much the government officials have pocketed themselves).
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  4. Automation is a winner-take-all strategy. Currently, around 45% of the value-added in the global automation sector comes from Japan. Germany is a distant 2nd place at around 10%. After that, there are a slew of countries at around 2%. China is at less than 1%. Automation might be a workable strategy for a handful of countries, but it will only be a small handful. Also, look at where Japan has built its biggest, most profitable highly automated factories. They're not in Japan. They're in the US, in Kentucky, Alabama, and Texas. Near the American consumer. Taking advantage of US access to energy and resources. So in addition to being a winner-take-all strategy, automation is also a need-to-be-a-close-ally-of-the-US strategy.
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  5. The US: - is self sufficient in energy. - is self sufficient in food, including being basically self sufficient in fertilizer. (Canada produces the potash that the US needs, but the export route for that potash goes through the US. The USA is guaranteed to always get first cut.)  - has good demographics and is very good as assimilating immigrants. - faces no significant security risks in its neighborhood. - is wealthy and well educated. - is less dependent on long distance trade (relative to GDP) than any other country outside of a handful of failed states. Germany is lacking in five out of the six.
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  6. Overland transport is too expensive and doesn’t have anywhere close to the necessary capacity. The BRI will be enough to keep a million or so top CCP officials living in luxury, but the country as a whole is screwed. But hey, that top million is all that matters, right?
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  7. Nearly impossible to patrol the Persian Gulf when you have to sail all the way back to China to refuel. You need a global network of military bases to provide global maritime security. And no one, not even China’s closest allies, trusts China enough to allow a permanent Chinese military presence on their soil.
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