[guru_max]

Originally Posted by SmartCat

For US, everything is fine if interest rates on 1 to 10 year treasury bonds are 0.5% to 2%.

The US was in a high inflation/interest rate scenario (stagflation) back in the 70s after the oil crisis. Ironically they came out of it helped no part by Milton Freidman influenced deregulation and trade promotion regime.

[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by guru_max

The US was in a high inflation/interest rate scenario (stagflation) back in the 70s after the oil crisis. Ironically they came out of it helped no part by Milton Freidman influenced deregulation and trade promotion regime.

They did not have this over bearing debt well in excess of their GDP ~125% today vs ~47% 1974. Nor did they have a economic rival the size of China to knock on their doors holding a very large quantum of US debt.

[vishnurp99]

Originally Posted by Samurai

such bias will affect the reasoning.
In a free market, jobs will go where the labour is cheapest, and people can't always follow the jobs. You can't really blame politicians or businesses for this. Let's see what would have happened if US had not sent jobs out.

There is always a bias in everybody's reasoning.

Wouldn't it be to better understand the bias & put yourself in the "person with the bias" shoes to understand the steelman version of the person's reasoning?

From a trumpian perspective - btw one which has given an unprecedented majority to Trump ( from a Republican perspective) , there has never been a free market. There was a system which enabled China to do dumping, market protection , currency manipulation & more. You need to do technology transfers & 51%JV to do business in China. IP protections are contextual in China. Many more examples of this.

Now a handful of businessmen, politicians , media organizations & educational institutions benefited from this. Essentially they were paid off by China in an indirect manner. Hence they supported & defended these policies.

Ideally you would have expected the governments of USA to ensure that this integration of China, Vietnam etc happens in a way that the majority of Americans benefit. That didn't happen.

Hence you have Trump - back with a bang for his second term.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by vishnurp99

There is always a bias in everybody's reasoning.

Wouldn't it be to better understand the bias & put yourself in the "person with the bias" shoes to understand the steelman version of the person's reasoning?

From a trumpian perspective - btw one which has given an unprecedented majority to Trump ( from a Republican perspective) , there has never been a free market. There was a system which enabled China to do dumping, market protection , currency manipulation & more. You need to do technology transfers & 51%JV to do business in China. IP protections are contextual in China. Many more examples of this.

These are just facts, why do you need Trumpian perspective?

[vishnurp99]

Originally Posted by Samurai

These are just facts, why do you need Trumpian perspective?

Even an year back, this would have been considered as a conspiracy theory by the Democrats and lot of the educated elites. There are people like Larry summers who held several key positions in Democrat administrations who reject this theory to this day. Even establishment Republicans rejected this theory sometime back. Would you disagree to this?

Trump made this mainstream. Hence the trumpian perspective.

According to this perspective, Trump's tariff driven high stakes poker diplomacy might help level the playing ground for USA and bring some blue collar jobs back to the USA.

[BullettuPaandi]

Originally Posted by vishnurp99

there has never been a free market

There is merit to this argument. I'll quote a post I shared earlier, where someone explains this well. 'How free can a free market be?' is an honest question that needs reasonable answers- I haven't looked hard, but nobody seems to have any.

But it'd be incredibly delusional to think this is about the 'common man'. Free market is the poorest of all explanations to income inequality. This doesn't even begin to fix that. If anything, the back-and-forth so far has only exemplified insider trading, market manipulation, etc. I don't see any of what's happening benefiting 'blue collared' people.

Call it a BullettuPaandian perspective if this doesn't make sense.

Originally Posted by BullettuPaandi

Just wanted to share this interview that I watched recently. I'm a fan of Jon Stewart for his sense of humour and ability/willingness to cut through bullshit regardless of the "sides" in politics. However, I'm confused after listening to both here: one seemingly thinks the Americans have been the victims of their own imperialism, and the other is apparently comfortable with that regardless, as he thinks without that the Germans will become Nazis again, while also acknowledging the benefits America has reaped because of it. I'm utterly dumbfounded by both ironic and baseless statements; but this is one of the intellectual and reasonable discussions I've come across that is respectfully done, nonetheless.

[LINK]

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by vishnurp99

Even an year back, this would have been considered as a conspiracy theory by the Democrats and lot of the educated elites. There are people like Larry summers who held several key positions in Democrat administrations who reject this theory to this day. Even establishment Republicans rejected this theory sometime back. Would you disagree to this?

But we are not Americans. China did the same to our manufacturing. Should we blame our politicians too? On the flip side, we did the same to IT services of USA and Europe.

Globalization happened at first due to labor arbitration and eventually changed to skills specialization. Once a supply chain is created using many companies, each focusing on their core competency, there is no going back. This is why I was so appreciative of the article posted here. It really nailed it, without shifting the blame to politicians or greed of companies. It focused on the economics and realities of manufacturing, which is the real reason why this genie can't be put back into the lamp.

[vishnurp99]

Originally Posted by Samurai

But we are not Americans. China did the same to our manufacturing. Should we blame our politicians too? On the flip side, we did the same to IT services of USA and Europe.

That is true. Obviously the above perspective is from the lens of American middle class.

I guess the big difference between the Indian IT services story & the Chinese manufacturing story is the protections that China gave it's businesses. China ensured that technology transfer & 51% JV had to be setup to leverage China's labour market and serve China's domestic market.

This resulted in home grown manufacturing & technology superstars in China. In India, instead you had Accentures , IBM, Capgemini and even product guys like Google setting up huge centres here .

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by vishnurp99

I guess the big difference between the Indian IT services story & the Chinese manufacturing story is the protections that China gave it's businesses. China ensured that technology transfer & 51% JV had to be setup to leverage China's labour market and serve China's domestic market.

Protection is a passive thing. But China did some active things like:

1) Providing world class education to its citizens, both in STEM and vocational training. Government treated it like a business investment.
2) They removed all red tape for doing business with China. A friend who was getting all his manufacturing done in China said that he could get more things done in China over a weekend, than he could get done in India in 3 months.
3) They created world class infrastructure in the form of road, rail, shipping, electricity, broadband, telecom, etc., all geared towards making China the manufacturing capital of the world.

Since they are a one-party dictatorship, they could do all this with no opposition or statutory/regulatory hurdles. India did none of the above, and being a democracy, it couldn't bulldoze industrial policy like China did. Try starting a company in India, and you will be faced with long list of hurdles even if you somehow arrange the funding. Our customs department alone has destroyed more businesses than funding crunch. I often joke that India succeeded in software export mainly because we could bypass customs. If I need a foreign software, I can download from any foreign website. But if I need any special equipment for my work, it can get stuck in customs for months. Once we had ordered an equipment from Europe, it arrived in Delhi airport in 24 hours. But they had added one free item which was not listed in the manifest. So, the package was stuck in customs for 3 months since the person who ordered it was in USA, and he was personally required to be present to release it.

[kavensri]

I am sharing my thoughts on customs clearance for importing HW items for internal company transfer.
Our company started moving some of the HW teams from high-cost-locations (US, Germany) to Pune in 2020. Soon they realized how challenging it is to get the HW items shipped from these locations, even if they are internal movements. After struggling with various options for 4+ years and no sight in getting these delays addressed, finally they decided to shutdown the department and move it to Brazil.

[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Our customs department alone has destroyed more businesses than funding crunch.

This sentence should be framed. It is God's truth in India. Of all the Govt departments I have dealt with Customs & Excise are far and above the worst and most venal in their attitude and I dare say lack of integrity. The Income Tax doesn't even come close. Now these Excise folks are running GST!!!

[speed79]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

This sentence should be framed. It is God's truth in India. Of all the Govt departments I have dealt with Customs & Excise are far and above the worst and most venal in their attitude and I dare say lack of integrity. The Income Tax doesn't even come close. Now these Excise folks are running GST!!!

I agree, the customs department is the most corrupt government department alongwith the GST. Since digitization, the corruption in Income tax department has reduced, as now we rarely need to interact with IT human interface.

Originally Posted by speed79

I agree, the customs department is the most corrupt government department alongwith the GST. Since digitization, the corruption in Income tax department has reduced, as now we rarely need to interact with IT human interface.

For us, Custom terrorism is an occasional thing, but GST terrorism is yearly phenomenon. It is despite the fact that most of our Software sales are export. But custom terrorism causes loss of business as customers tend to send devices for development as the documentation needed is too much. In one case, the customer had sent us a touch screen monitor for us to test our software on it, but the custom officer was not ready to consider it a touch screen monitor and declared that it is a TV which is a restricted item for import in India. We could not get it released until we paid a bribe. When we tested the device, it had got some hardware issue which limited its usage for few minutes and it worked again only after half an hour of shut down. The customer did not send replacement device as they knew the difficulties faced at custom in India and we had to face loss of time and inefficiency while working with the failty device.

@mods please merge the two posts as edit time windows had expired.

[Samurai]

Renowned US economist Prof. Jeffrey D Sachs rips into the US tariff policy.

https://youtu.be/SxYng1ry4TU

[PGA]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

The reputation built over literally 80 years since 1945 is damaged.

We are witnessing the biggest geo-political event since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Sir, the events unfolding cannot be summed up better than this, these are two clear facts that emerge. Time to time history does throw up such men who manage to bring their empires to spectacular ruin in almost all fields of human endeavour.

At individual level, the old order did bring prosperity to whole lot of us Indians in the last 50 years. I do feel for the kids whose dreams of a life in the western world have hit a pause for the time being.

[WhyMe]

I guess this video reiterates many pro advices above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6I_-R_8ePc