Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "Asianometry"
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Paul,
I had a lunch with the Japan head of Mobil Oil in 1977 at which we discussed what the Rockefeller Oil companies as a group had been doing to head off -- really, genuinely to solve the problem, long term -- in California in 1967, ten years earlier.
The actual laws needed, primarily cap and trade to ensure at least faintly efficient use of capital, should have been started in the 1960s. Here we are sixty years later. I'm 79 years old. And we still haven't gotten to step one.
Oil company interests? Nope. The oil industry of 1967, or 1977, or 1980, has vanished. It's been totally replaced, as has all of all other industries. It's just that we decided in the past sixty years to replace the bad with the bad, even though the oil companies -- or at least the main ones -- knew "This is no good and we've got to replace it with something different" way back then.
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Jon,
Tsinghua Unigroup (紫光集團): Hunh? How did Tsing (or your historically interesting "Qing") Hua become Zi3 Guang1, Purple Rays?
And a quite different query: It's certainly correct in a formal sense that they "defaulted" on their bonds, but what really happened is, they failed to roll over their bonds. Bonds don't normally get paid off; bond-debt is normally a form of long-term "equity-ish" capital that gets refinanced every now and then at rates that will reflect market conditions outside the company concerned.
This means that failure to roll-over, leading to failure to reply, reflected earlier decisions and some broad concatenation of internal and external conditions.
What I want to know, then, is who owned the bongs and refused to roll them over? And why did refusing to refinance them make sense to them, given that it involved a huge immadiate lodd (modulo tax write-offs, that is...)?
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Jon,
Your comment three or four minutes in, that the British never intended Hong Kong to be more than a trading post, is spot on.
My maternal grandfather, an energetic and intelligent man and a textile manufacturer, in the English Midlands, died wealthy, a pounds multi-millionaire at a time when the UK pound was worth five US dollars. He started out poor, and the Mechanics' Handbook of his boyhood was my daily reading, a couple of pages a day in the toilet, for some years. Good sound technical reading which has helped me in my own business careers. As a teenager he invented, developed, and patented an improved way of connecting the ends of any power-take-off belt, then invested the income in his own factories, and Bob's Yer Uncle.
He had four wives and twelve children, and WWII didn't help the textile industry much, but he still managed to pay for a good deal of my education, and I'm grateful to him.
One of the memories of my childhood was my mother reporting what my uncles were worried about, all those Australian cops hired to keep down the Hong Kong textile mills. It didn't work. The last of our English mills closed in the 1970s. The Hong Kong folks who put them out of business have since had to worry about Vietnamese, Malaysian, and other Asian competitors. Some of them financed by my daughter the engineer...
One lesson is that drunken, crooked, superannuated Australian cops are not the best people to hire, even for dubious work.
A better lesson is that the parts of the family who moved onto other industries have done very well, thank you very much, and we wish honest hard-working Chinese well in everything they do.
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Mention of Hayakawa's three-and-a-half yen radio reminds me of a landlady I had in Japan. She had a large rock, about the size of a Vokswagen minibus, in her garden, and she had recently, in 1975, had it moved from one side of her front door to the other. For this she had had to pay a labour gang ten thousand yen which you can think of as a C-note of a good dinner for four. OK, I checked: 2,307.27 New Taiwanese Yuan to you, Jon.)
"Ten thousand yen!" she would cry at me, "Ichi-man yen...!
So piteous: Before World War Two she had bought the rock in the mountains of the north and had it shipped down to Tokyo and brought out to our suburb. All for five yen!
A two-thousand-fold change in prices -- (and though she didn't include the calculation, probably a 200,000-fold change in the distance.)
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If you think Hong Kong has no public goods, you need to look at an aerial photograph of the border.
The Hong Kong side of the clearly visible line is all parks and forest land. The, uh, "Peoples'" side is trashy housing and broken-down commercial sites.
As for all the people puking and mewling about the service industry, you simply need to thin a bit more about what goes on inside a factory: every factory I've ever worked in has had aisles full of fork-lift trucks providing transportation services between locations where workers provided labour services at machines which dod punching, drilling, folding, bending, and other such-like services. Upsstairs there were always rooms full of people in whirts and ties. They provide financial and planning services, sales and warehousing services. Hell, even coffee and snack services.
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Anonymous @softmechanics3130
You wouldn't happen to have a fact to go with your half-baked opinion, would you? (My apologies to the good and useful number 0.5.)
Germany no doubt has a thicker and deeper loam of older industries, but I think you will find that South Korea, like Japan, is an avid importer of German machines, technologies, advanced chemicals -- and of course luxury automobiles.
When you do the homework you obviously don't know that you haven't done, you will find, too, that South Korea exports machines and advanced technology to Germany.
The cutting edge of the world's industry knows no boundaries, though there are some residual frictions at some "national" "borders" here and there.
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