Comment by robinsoncrusue

Comment by robinsoncrusue 2 days ago

20 replies

The question is there is no other place for money to go. Liquidity is still in abundance and no other market can capture that liquidity. Eurozone is a total mess, ECB is doing one reckless thing after another which will inevitably lead to Germany leaving Eurozone at some point. Japan market is a joke, Asia and emerging market has huge governance issues. Bond market has penalized the investors and only more pain is in sight. All in all, there is a lot of doom and gloom out there. But I don't see a viable alternative.

Sure, Mark Carney gave his little speech in Davos. The same Mark Carney, that led Brookfield while its finance arms operating out of US.

But realistically, how is opening up to China more even considered as the alternative? When has any deal with China worked at a strategic advantage for the other side? Is not the whole reason the so called globalization project failed was because players like China did not play by the same rule or did not even have to play by the same rule? What gives they will when you open up the market more to them? All it takes is for them to take your product, copy it and sell it 20x cheaper and flood the market everywhere else.

benrutter 2 days ago

> The question is there is no other place for money to go.

Whenever I've heard people speculate on the US bond market losing its footing, the suggestion isn't that "Japan will be the new US" (eg) - it's that investor will spread assets across multiple places (US, Japan, EU, etc) to hedge against risk, rather than just the US.

  • tick_tock_tick 2 days ago

    That's not an answer. Japan and the EU can't handle those flows so again there is no other place to go.

    • johnnyanmac a day ago

      Even if it's hopeless, the best strategy when everything is falling is to bet evenly. Whether or not those countries can "handle it" doesn't matter.

      You're not betting in winning, you're betting on minimalizing losses. Huge difference in behavior.

      • XorNot a day ago

        Yeah people talk about this as though US treasuries didn't have a negative yield for a considerable amount of time.

        People were literally paying the US government to hold their money because it was better then the alternatives: the options can all be bad, but some can be worse.

jfyi a day ago

The alternative is recognizing that China offers a level of long term stability that the US is failing to match. That stability is worth a premium. You may not believe it's a high one, but our trade partners facing random tariff changes every month see it differently, even if just for a negotiating tactic at the current stage.

We also need to seriously adjust our line of thinking at what they are capable of. The "copycat" era is ending. Our supply chains have hammered their youth with generations of engineering knowledge. If you are relying on an ideological difference to assume they are not capable of innovation, you are making a strategic mistake.

  • plaidfuji 18 hours ago

    China innovates orders of magnitude faster than they did even ten years ago. Yes, a lot of it is still copycat, but there is value in being able to copy quickly and well.

    The question is whether China offers long-term stability for external investment. Should US retirement portfolios load up on Chinese equities?

fcantournet a day ago

  ECB is doing one reckless thing after another which will inevitably lead to Germany leaving Eurozone at some point.
I'm not even sure what you're trying to say with the rest of it but this is nonsense. The ECB policy IS German, and has been for 3 decades. All of germany's economy is organized around the existence of the eurozone with Germany controlling a unified monetary policy.
  • izacus 21 hours ago

    One thing I can always be sure about, is reading premium gold plated, high quality, absolute dumbest nonsense about EU policies and state of EU on this website.

drgo a day ago

For a "little" speech, it is all people seem to talk about; e.g., it was mentioned few times in the comments above. And, yes, one can be on the board of a public company and still make valid and consequential analyses. Hell, one can be a convicted fraudster and at the same time become the president of a superpower. My point, you could belittle Canada, EU, China etc but it is going to solve the US's intractable problems.

nl a day ago

> When has any deal with China worked at a strategic advantage for the other side?

Australia did well out of the Australian-China free trade agreement and then won the subsequent (Australian-caused) trade war.

Turns out being able to produce iron ore cheaper than anyone else and having plenty of alternate buyers when China bans imports means the iron ore price just goes up, Australian miners make more money and Chinese manufacturers get annoyed at Chinese trade policies.

Wasn't awesome for Australian lobster fishers though.

saguntum 2 days ago

What is a mess about the Eurozone and reckless about the ECB?

throwawayqqq11 2 days ago

We have so many problems. So many savaged construction sites that we knew for decades were important. The problem is not, where all this fiat money could go, there are plenty of places. The problem is, where it can go and make a profit. That was a hint to broaden your perspective.

dgellow a day ago

> which will inevitably lead to Germany leaving Eurozone at some point

No chance. Unless that happens after a lots of other countries leave

ajross a day ago

> Liquidity is still in abundance and no other market can capture that liquidity.

I don't know what that means? Market crashes are changes in speculative value, they don't care about counting literal amounts of currency. Selling US securities doesn't require that the resulting "liquidity" move anywhere else, just that the owner prefers to see a cash balance to a stock certificate or whatever.

Basically this point seems like a big "confused money with value" mistake.

  • neilwilson 20 hours ago

    But importantly the person buying the stock certificate etc preferred to see that rather than a cash balance.

    For every seller there has to be a buyer.