World News

"Sir, our youth unemployment rate is 25%! What should we do?"

"Easy, just stop reporting it. If we don't know what it is then it's not a problem we have to deal with"

Brilliant

Your annual reminder for the past ten years that "China is about to collapse any day now"

Feels like I’ve been reading headlines like this for at least 3 years now. If it all finally comes crashing down, it’s gonna be a big one I guess.

Okay, can someone explain THIS giant load of seeming bullshit to me?

In 2023, the U.S. economy vastly outperformed expectations. A widely predicted recession never happened. Many economists (though not me) argued that getting inflation down would require years of high unemployment; instead, we’ve experienced immaculate disinflation, rapidly falling inflation at no visible cost.

By every marker that matters to the POPULACE (costs of food, shelter, energy for shelter, cars, gas for cars, and medical insurance (required)) inflation has gone WAY THE HELL UP, shows no signs of abating, and jobs (in the tech sector at least) are taking a dive. Wages are not keeping pace with costs of living, and people I knew who were on the low end of "rich" are now starting to be as scared as the upper middle class.

Everyone keeps saying the economy is fricking awesome, but rent is astronomical, groceries are bonkers, gas prices are still at "I DID THIS" sticker stupidity levels, few people can get a home, used cars are going for 5 to 10 times what they're worth, and everyone I know around the country is running a much tighter ship than they were during COVID LOCKDOWN.

All of these "new jobs" we keep hearing about are just a small percentage of positions vacated by layoffs. Companies let tons of people go in one fell swoop and hire new people for 1/10th to 1/5th of the positions at lower wages with worse "total compensation" packages.

The recruiters have COMPLETELY stopped hitting up myself and my employed friends. Not a single fricking "you look like a great blahblahblah" for almost a month when it was previously multiple hits a day.

As far as I can tell, we're IN a recession, we're just calling it a recovery for some reason.

Nothing good in the history of mankind has ever come from conservatism. Nothing.

Same problem as anywhere else. Instead of the money getting back into the economy by giving it to people at the bottom, it leaves the economy by ending up in the hands of a few rich.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Democratic nations like the United States rarely politicize their economic statistics — although ask me again if Donald Trump returns to office — but authoritarian regimes often do.

President Xi Jinping is starting to look like a poor economic manager, whose propensity for arbitrary interventions — which is something autocrats tend to do — has stifled private initiative.

Well, international economists are fond of citing Dornbusch’s Law: “The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.” What happened in China’s case was that the government was able to mask the problem of inadequate consumer spending for a number of years by promoting a gigantic real estate bubble.

To outside observers, what China must do seems straightforward: end financial repression and allow more of the economy’s income to flow through to households, and strengthen the social safety net so that consumers don’t feel the need to hoard cash.

And when it comes to strengthening the safety net, the leader of this supposedly communist regime sounds a bit like the governor of Mississippi, denouncing “welfarism” that creates “lazy people.”

Will it try to prop up its economy with an export surge that will run headlong into Western efforts to promote green technologies?

The original article contains 877 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 76%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!