[lbo-talk] China not a capitalist "democracy"; Beijing controls the economy

Charles Brown cb31450 at gmail.com
Fri May 22 07:46:18 PDT 2015


China is not a capitalist "democracy", that is the central government can dictatorially order the capitalists; they don't have full private property rights:

No anarchy of production

" I spoke with Grant Engelbart Thursday morning, a fund manager at the $6.5 billion CLS Investments in Omaha. We covered a lot of ground. But he said something that backs up what Rothman is saying at Matthews.

_This is not a capitalist democracy. Beijing will tell the market what it can and cannot do. “I don’t think the market appreciates the fact that Beijing controls the economy,” _he says.

If you’re one of the millions of Chinese mainlanders opening margin accounts to buy Hong Kong listed shares — something regulators have warned about recently — there is always the chance that the government just decides to put the breaks on buying equities with debt. There’s no voting on it. Beijing can just say your debt is gone, and its gone. Indeed this has already happened before. When the roughly $500 million trust fund China Equals Gold No. 1 went belly up, critics charged that this was the tip of the iceberg. There were more to come. A few more did come. But China banks haven’t gone belly up. If there is a crisis developing there, Westerners surely don’t know the details."

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/05/21/china-debt-bomb-more-like-a-bottle-rocket/



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