China

Chinese skylines are defined by construction cranes and the din of jackhammers. China produces 50 percent of the world's cement—the next largest producer, India is responsible for just 6 percent—to build seemingly endless tracts of high rises, railroads, parking lots, highways, airports and shopping malls. But all booms end—and China's may end sooner than most people think.

To mark the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a German arts organization launched a website called the "Berlin Twitter Wall." Anyone anywhere on the Internet could use Twitter to post a comment into one of the speech bubbles. Within a few days of its launch, the website was overrun by messages in Chinese. Instead of talking about the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism in Europe, Chinese Twitter users accessed the site to protest their own government's Internet censorship.

** Please note the change of location.**

Current trends suggest that a major energy transition is unlikely before 2020. It is only after that date that trends such as the exhaustion of cheap oil or China’s conversion to a consumer society might raise prices enough to trigger long-term changes.

High on the Tibetan plateau stands a rustic observation station. Comprised of two low sheds with corrugated steel roofs and one 90-foot tower, it is located in the no man's land known as Hohxil -- one of the world' s last remaining wilderness areas.

"There is a saying that Chinese people are afraid of officials, and officials are afraid of foreign reporters," my friend Yang, a wily reporter for one of Beijing's city newspapers, told me as we were driving to dinner one evening. That was last spring, well before the government's recent efforts to intimidate foreign reporters attempting to cover calls for a "jasmine revolution," but it has been true a long time.

-- This is a guest post by Jay Pelosky, Principal, J2Z Advisory, LLC --  Japan’s massive earthquake, follow on tsunami and subsequent nuclear power plant upheaval have reinforced uncertainty regarding the strength of global economic activity and the appropriate financial assets prices to reflect that activity. The Arab Spring and EU debt crisis meant such uncertainty was already in the air in the weeks preceding the March 11^th earthquake.

As was suggested in an earlier post, China has an unusual low level of consumption and unusual high level of investment and savings.  The high level of savings is not, as is often assumed, attributable only to an increase in household savings, but to a rise in savings in the corporate and government sectors.  From 2000 to 2008, 80% of the increase in China’s gross national savings took place in the government and corporate sectors, not among households.  (The savings rate data for this post is based on the

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis in the autumn of 2008, Chinese officials identified the US-dollar based monetary system as a contributing cause of the crisis and an ongoing source of systemic risk for the global financial system. In response, they began a program for internationalizing the Chinese currency, the yuan, whose circulation was hitherto largely restricted to mainland China.

It is widely known that China needs to rebalance its economy to rely more on consumption, but the extent of China’s imbalance between consumption and investment is not fully appreciated.  Comparisons to other emerging markets and countries like Japan, Taiwan, and Korea that pioneered the East Asian growth model show that China’s low levels of consumption are unparalleled.