Hong Kong's secret strength

Doyle Saylor djsaylor at ix.netcom.com
Mon Aug 3 08:33:29 PDT 1998


Hello Everyone,

Chris Burford asks Barkley Rosser what tanked means. Yes Barkley what does the word tanked mean? The man with dictionary extraordinaire must keep us informed!

Chris writes Aug. 1, 98: "BTW I do not want to have a go at Barkley as such, because I appreciate his engagement but I think he demonstrates a much wider resistance to the consideration of serious structural reform of the capitalist system that would weaken the system significantly. Why this resistance? I suspect part of it is the ideological pressure of the university system that makes it safer to be worldly wise and somewhat cynical about the possibilities of change rather than arguing a case that could be made to appear academically ridiculous and throw one's position in the department in doubt. I have the advantage in this debate of not being an economist. There are no penalties for being stupid."

Doyle Well Chris I'm just a working class guy. All that really concerns me is unemployment, and retirement. The ideological pressure I feel is the supervisor threatening to write me up for insubordination. I mean I must do as I'm told.

Chris "Hong Kong for a city state of 6 billion has massive reserves of the order of $30 billion (corrections gratefully received but I doubt if the order of magnitude is wrong)."

Doyle This wording sounds a little garbled, but the figure I have heard for Hong Kong's reserves was $80 billion. Hopefully Barkley is available to look up the right number.

Chris "I am not into prediction or advising fund managers (which appears to be the aim of the sources he cites)."

Doyle I get the impression that "the Age" is simply an Australian popular media. At any rate whether I picked up the historical information from the desk of some fund manager whom I am sweeping up their office, or get the info on the internet, who cares? More to the point is to look at how Hong Kong is organized in the larger context of the world system. The real power here is China, not Hong Kong. There seems to be a second financial crisis brewing which may pull down China, and precipitate a deflation the "popular" business press is preoccupied with. What works, what is salutory in the debacle is worth studying as you point out. But the fundamentals of who owns what real estate in Hong Kong seems to me to miss the wider problems worth studying right now. I get the sense that you have happened upon something that has caught your attention, but it needs more working out to make sense to me as important in a Marxist sense. Your view seems to be that the fundamentals of land rents is a great bulwork against the crisis. I don't get it that we have enough information to judge this here. But I remain interested and open minded. Of course I will continue to shoot "fund manager" data at you until I'm convinced you have the tanking right. regards, Doyle Saylor



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