Sol Sanders Archive

Reserve Bank of India rates force lending for preferred firms to 13 percent and notorious paper-shuffling babus [clerks] hobble initiative, sending Indian coal companies, for example, despite some of the world’s largest reserves, chasing projects from Australia to North America. A spate of influence peddling scandals, including $16 billion in telecommunications, further clouds the scene.

New Delhi’s geopolitical rival, China, has turned its back on its 25-year strategy to prevent destabilization of one-party dictatorship with maximum growth. With incipient inflation, Communist leadership enters a generational succession next year trimming its investment-led behemoth’s sails. Widespread civil violence — despite enormous expenditures for the most elaborate hi-tech suppression machine in the history of authoritarianism — jeopardizes any new tactics.

In fact, all the Chinese boom’s contradictory chickens simultaneously are coming home to roost: Vast overexpansion of infrastructure feeding the boom [along with subsidized exports] has produced marvels for photographers but a real estate bubble including, literally, empty new cities. There’s growing resentment over second class citizenship and lack of services among more than 200 million migrant labor from rural areas stampeded to coastal cities employment. Declining foreign markets, roaring imported commodity prices [ironically brought on in part by speculation on “unlimited” Chinese demand], wage pressure, competition from export-led cheap-wage producers, monumental corruption, all now threaten “the Chinese model.”

Consumption continues to decline as a percentage of domestic product mocking talk of redirecting a growth strategy. A combination of nonconvertibility and hot money chasing an undervalued yuan demonstrates how empty talk of it as an international reserve currency is. Beijing’s capacity for foot in mouth disease is epitomized in its increasing hoard of dollars and Treasury debt [again on the upswing] while officials continuously publicly denigrate the dollar.

So much for “the emerging markets.”

Turning to the developed world, there, too, crises are escalating.

A bureaucratic hassle over the Euro with divergent views in Berlin, Paris, Brussels and Frankfurt is turning into a dragged out effort to save the 17 European Union members’ common currency. Meanwhile other integration efforts — a free labor market and common defense and foreign policy — are faltering.

A Greek default could produce a European banking crisis [even contagion for North America]. In other words, a fiscal and monetary crisis is turning into a major political upheaval threatening accepted European patterns.

Half-baked intervention in Libya, dragging in NATO and the U.S., was announced in idealistic terms by Europe’s leaders. But it encapsulates European concerns — unlike the increasingly hot American debate over the Obama administration’s opting for “a war of choice.”

For Europe “Libya” is linked directly to falling birthrates and need for imported labor and unemployed North African, Middle Eastern and Black African youth almost literally swimming the Mediterranean at a time Muslim immigrant assimilation is increasingly questioned.

Europe faces, too, the fact the world’s window to the U.S. consumer maw which supplied the post-World War II economy not only with unlimited markets but revolutionary technology has a “closed for repairs” sign with no reopening time indicated. Whatever happens after decades of drunken sailor’s spending, there will be no substantial U.S. economic strategy in place until after November 2012.

Current Washington debate, if it can be dignified with that title, over raising the debt limit and reducing government spending, is simply a foretaste of the pain necessary to get the U.S. economy — perhaps now sliding into a double-dip recession — back to its historic miraculous production of jobs and expanding markets.

It’s going to be a long hot summer and a grim fall — despite the American sideshow of political shenanigans with the curtain only temporarily coming down on the first [Weiner] scene.