xiaohongshu [none/use name]

I think it’s because a lot more criminals use Telegram than other platforms like Facebook.

It’s because of Putin. You have to work harder, sacrifice more all because Putin is trying to invade Europe. Without Putin, you wouldn’t have had to go through this. Blame Putin, not us.

250,000,000 is a BIG number!

lol

I have said it before and I will say it again: Trump’s assault on public institutions will end with a public backlash against federalism in America. It is going to pre-emptively kill off any kind of nationalization narrative that the left has been attempting to make a case for.

It is a spectacle. It is priming the people for the eventual “mainstream” narrative that says “oh, you want your kids’ educations to be funded by the government? Look, what if just one person, you know, like Donald Trump, just like Mao in communist China, who doesn’t like your politics, who hates DEI, and decides to defund our academic institutions with world class reputation built over an entire century?”

“Trump’s reckless use of his executive power shows us exactly why the FREE MARKET, not nationalization, is the superior system. Under the free market, you will find always be able to find private investors who are fine with your IDEOLOGY, who cares about FREEDOM OF SPEECH, and therefore willing to finance your business. A true marketplace of ideas. It is exactly the opposite of Trumpian authoritarianism that Trump is attempting to emulate from the oppressive Chinese regime.”

The bourgeoisie are fully behind this.

Point taken. The US can, in fact, default on its bonds as a political choice, and it would take Congress to do it.

On the flip side, it’s not a bad thing that the US stops selling treasuries (anything beyond a 3-month bills)? Why give out free money to rich people?

Nothing bad can happen if the US just stops selling treasuries (it doesn’t need to borrow to spend) - just a lot of domestic and foreign investors losing their money and won’t buy dollar-denominated treasuries ever again, but then there is no need for a government running a floating exchange rate to do that (just let the interest rate fall to 0%). It’s a regressive system inherited from the gold standard era where your currency is pegged to a metal/some other currency.

It’s just standard operations.

If foreign central banks don’t want to buy US treasuries, or have sold off their holdings of US treasuries, then they will simply spend the money elsewhere (e.g. purchase other dollar-denominated securities, in which case, somebody else gets the money and have to choose to spend it elsewhere, or to save in US treasuries).

If they choose to keep the money in a (US) bank, then the bank will simply use the reserves to buy US treasuries. In this case, instead of foreign central banks earning interests, it is a US bank that earns the interests lol.

Reserves are simply money that only banks have special access to in the central bank (in the US, this is the Federal Reserve). Its goal is to clear payments.

Let me give you a simplified example: say I transfer $1000 to your account (because I bought something from you), how does that $1000 disappear from my bank account and reappear in your bank account (assume in another bank)?

This is where reserves come in: my bank will debit $1000 from my account, and its reserves also simultaneously drop by $1000 (special account in the Fed). Your bank will then have an increase in $1000 in reserves, and a corresponding $1000 is credited into your bank account.

This is what allows millions and millions of bank transactions and payments to clear every single day, all around the world!

If you choose to withdraw this $1000 to buy US treasury bonds (effectively a savings account), then your bank account will drop by $1000, your bank’s reserve will also drop by $1000. In exchange, you get a bond certificate valued at $1000 with a certain % of interest until maturity.

Alternatively, if you choose to keep the $1000 sitting in your bank account, then your bank will simply take its $1000 in its reserve account in the Fed to buy US treasury bond. In this case, the bank will be the one earning interests, not you.

Remember, the national debt is simply the total amount of dollars the US federal government has spent that has not been taxed back yet. It is simply an accounting problem. No matter how you look at it, the amount of national debt will always equate to total US government deficits that haven’t been taxed back.

So all this talk about “stealth QE” is simply a misunderstanding of how central banking operations work. If bond investors don’t want to buy US treasuries, then what simply happens is they lose out on earning free money from the government. And if nobody wants to buy it (nobody wants free money), the Fed simply buys it through QE, which means nobody gets free money. The risk of US government defaulting on its bonds is exactly zero.

The Bank of England wrote a very nice explanation (complete with illustrations) on how such banking operations work, dispelling many of the myths often repeated about governments borrowing to spend.

How long before the US is going to use AI to run its economy?

I feel like this is now a very distinct possibility and will certainly have a disastrous outcome. Maybe the empire is really going to collapse under its own weight by chasing the AI crap lol.

How is saying that China should raise its wages so that the Chinese working class has the purchasing power to import from other Global South countries, a “chauvinist” position?

This is going to cause the Chinese manufacturing industries to be redistributed to the Global South. At the same time, living standards in China and the countries they import from will improve because of increased wages. How is that a bad thing?

Alternatively, a Chinese-style Marshall Plan that floods the Global South with yuan, which gives people from the other Global South countries the purchasing power to purchase Chinese goods, and this will in turn raise the wages of the Chinese working class, raising their own purchasing power, and this back and forth will lead to a more balanced and equitable development between countries.

This is way better than China investing in some poor countries to extract their minerals and resources to fuel their own manufacturing sector at home, and in effect, just another form of colonization. What I am proposing is actually going help develop and industrialize the other poor countries, like what the US did to post-war Germany through Marshall Plan.

Currently, China wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want to be the global export superpower (which squeezes the wages of the other Global South countries because they simply do not have the production of scale to match China’s) and at the same time they don’t want other countries to save in yuan, because they want other countries to import Chinese goods, not to save in its currency. This is leading to the exporting countries competing with one another, and why they all still depend on the US to become the “buyer of the last resort”, because there is nowhere else for the surplus goods to go. How is that “chauvinist”?

The reason I brought up the EU is because the euro is still a far more acceptable currency for most countries to save in (see the figure in my previous comment) than yuan (how many Global South countries do you think would prefer to hold euro than Chinese yuan? The vast majority of them!), and quite frankly, the real concern for the US imperialists if the dollar is ever going to be challenged. I seriously think that the US has calculated that China is never going to weaponize its yuan, and so far they have been proven right.

Just remember to take everything I say with a huge grain of salt lol.

This is going to come across as a bit of incoherent rambling, but let me try:

Honestly, I think the take that “China already has a strong economic base and financial system to challenge US hegemony” is far more optimistic than what I’ve commonly heard in Western leftist spaces like “nooo China still needs MORE primitive accumulation of capital to become socialist!” and “China is playing the long game and this liberal policy is actually a WIN for BRICS”.

Like, my friend, China already has a global manufacturing share of 31% (compared to 18% in the US, and 5% each for Germany and Japan). If this is still not enough, then our entire socialist project is doomed. How else are other countries ever going to achieve socialism?

I’m also not going to sugar coat it: China’s economy is the only one that can directly challenge and realistically replace the US, at least in short-intermediate term. It is a policy choice. The key challenge is how to get the world to accept the yuan, and to get the local bourgeoisie who have accumulated trillions of dollars over the past decades to give up their huge privilege.

And just to dispel the idea that my analysis is frequently “China centric”, I’ll remind everyone that this source of optimism that we have for the past few years was only because of Russia’s valiant defiance against the entire Western-dominated economic and financial system. People often under-appreciate what Putin had done that, while the Ukraine war was provoked and caused mass casualties, its defiance to unprecedented global sanctions forced the US to take a high risk gambling approach to protect the hegemony of the dollar.

You’ll often see me praising Putin for canceling $23 billion of Africa’s debt, because that’s absolutely the right thing to do, if only China had followed up with its trillions of dollar reserves - it can achieve a lot for the Global South just by making the big numbers of its bank statement to go down. And Russia indeed had rallied many Global South countries to its call for de-dollarization (anyone remembers the summer of 2022? It was nice, albeit a bit naive in retrospect) Unfortunately Russia’s economy was simply too weak to take on the global hegemon, and China’s eventual doubling down for preserving the dollar hegemony sealed the fate of this unprecedented opening never seen in decades.

I will also give it that Putin’s willingness to let the world sanctioning its oligarchs is far more of a baller move than China has ever done in recent years. Too bad, when your economy is weak, and doesn’t help with the liberal economists continuing to sabotage from within, there is only so much energy you can exert on a global scale - exactly what I have said about most countries simply being too weak to take on the global hegemon.

On the flip side, I often wonder how much longer can China keep going with the charade? No, this is not the right wing’s “China’s going to collapse because of COMMUNISM” lol. While the US economy itself seems teetering on an impending crisis, my pessimism is more a reflection of what many people around me have felt in recent months: the initial surge (often fueled by nationalistic propaganda) of “China is defeating Western countries in handling Covid!” in 2020 had gradually turned into “the economy’s gonna recover after Zero Covid, we just need to give it some time” in 2023 to the more pessimistic “welp, the recovery that was promised isn’t happening, I’m gonna be careful with how I spend with so much uncertainty in the world” last year. With the uncertainty of getting laid off at any point, people chose to save instead, because a lack of welfare means that people fear their current level of income, once lost, cannot be easily replenished.

The plunging property market (it’s cooked) and the deflationary spiral despite multiple rounds of subsidies have fueled a lot of disappointment, if not resentment. For many people, it’s almost as if the government will do anything just to avoid raising the wages of the people. Lots of big charts showing the economic recovery, but people continue to feel their wallets getting lighter (reminds me of the Bidenomics propaganda in the US not too long ago).

Meanwhile, the two key economists who pushed for the whole property market investment scheme for the past decade, Justin Lin Yifu and Meng Xiaosong, continued to be revered by the leadership, doubling down on rhetoric like “we need to double down on more investments to raise the wages of the people so they can consume”, when one should be asking: “how is producing even more goods going to raise wages when nobody has the money to buy them?”

It doesn’t help that for those paying attention to left politics, Xi’s ten years of reining in private capital and cracking down neoliberalism have ended in complete reversal over the span of the past few months, with Xi now doubling down on affirming the “sanctity” of private capital (that the COMMUNIST Party of China will DEFEND lol) and disgraced capitalists like Jack Ma have now returned to the altar.

There has been a lot of nationalistic propaganda about how China’s consumption has recovered “look at the record turnout to watch Ne Zha 2” lol and “wow look so many people traveling on May Day holiday, who says China has a consumption problem?” as if people aren’t frontloading their vacations to take advantage of promoted subsidies. But, how long can these “feel good” propaganda last?

There is now a lot of technocratic push to promote a technological revolution like EVs (the price wars are decimating hundreds of companies and suppliers), solar panels (the industry registered one of the worst losses last year) and AI and robotics, hoping that a technological revolutiom is going to bring forth an economic transformation, magically propeling the country to a high income country. Too much emphasis on STEM (too much worshipping Elon Musk) and too few attention paid to social policies and reforms. Anything to avoid giving people money and welfare.

So, how long before people are going to endure before they have had enough? How long can the liberals continue to sell their snake oil economics before the central leadership (which unfortunately is full of them right now) decides that they can no longer be trusted? Furthermore, how long before the central government rein in on the outsized authorities of the local governments (a sequelae of decentralization since the post-Mao reform), that have continued to cause troubles at the national level?

No, I’m not saying that China’s economy is going to collapse lol, that’s never going to happen. But if you had asked me if China is treading the path of Japan, even just two years ago, I would have thought ridiculous. Now, I’m not so sure anymore.

Sorry for the long rant. I hope it gives you some perspective from my end.

Honestly, it probably came down to economics.

Everyone seems to have forgotten that there is still a 10% global tariffs on every country other than China, and Trump has made it clear that support for Israel is non-negotiable, not only for their foreign “partners”, but also for domestic US citizens.

This is one place where I think the US ruling imperialist class really leaned in on Trump’s pompous performance to psychologically manipulate the world’s reception towards US policies.

If Trump had just announced a 10% global tariffs, there would have been huge public outcry across the world.

Instead, what we get was at first, an insane Trump tariff plan where everyone laughed at how stupid it is “haha he’s imposing 150% tariffs on the penguins!!” and then Trump would “walk back” to “only 10%” and the world suddenly breathed a sigh of relief and quietly accepted the rate - for the fear that any noise could irritate a vindictive Trump to raise tariffs against their particular countries again.

A tariff is a tax on US consumers, it would raise the price, but on the flip side, it also means that the exporting countries have to deal with surplus export capacity. Every country now hopes for a deal with Trump because the first countries that manage to bring their tariffs down to 0% would be the winners against their exporting competitors.

Trump’s global tariff is actually threatening to unleash a mercantilistic fight among the exporting countries, and this is very dangerous because you can’t just keep adjusting the prices - at some point, overproduction leads to price collapse, and economic recession.

And while this is all playing out, the US is reshaping the global supply chain to its own interest.

This is happening because the world (many Global South countries) have bought into the “export led growth” model (lie) proposed (imposed) by the IMF. The idea that you have to earn export revenues before you can invest domestically can only work as long as there is a country willing to run a huge trade deficit at all times so you, the exporting country, can accumulate the trade surplus.

This was how Taiwan and South Korea “won” the race back in the 1970s-90s (the Four Asian Dragons), before the rise of China, and every other country has since flocked to emulate that strategy, believing that one day they will also become like Taiwan and South Korea.

Trump is now saying “I’m bored of the old winners, they no longer benefit me, I’m now reshuffling the board to pick a new set of winners. Here is your chance to rise to the top if you stroke my ego enough.” Pure mercantilism.

This is also why you see so many pro-BRICS, pro-China “alt media” people are now going through their cognitive dissonance. “US import only comprises 2% of China’s exports lol! Who cares??” But somehow many countries found themselves unable to just stop exporting to the US and replace their demand somewhere else. Strange.

I know I sound like a broken record at this point, but for the 25th time this week (lol), if there is no country willing to take on the net importer role to replace the US as a net deficit spender, then the US will always have a say on global trade.

That’s simply how the world has been shaped over the past several decades with the US and China enjoying running huge trade imbalances at the expense of the rest of the world. One of these two countries have to decide they no longer want to be part of this cursed marriage, and the shocking revelation is that the US seems to be the one who wants to break off from this marriage, and China doing everything it can to save it.

Also, bonus: there used to be another economic bloc that could challenge US’s dominance, and that is the EU. The euro is a far more acceptable saving currency for the rest of the world compared to yuan - and the real threat to the dollar hegemony in recent years. (If you somehow think I’m a “chauvinist” for China, you’ll see here that this is not the case).

However, very conveniently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine just had to happen, and with the EU losing their cheap gas supply from Russia, it’s all but over for Europe:

The Russia-Ukraine war killed the euro and subjugated the entire European subcontinent to the US. This is what allowed Trump to advance to the next stages of US imperial strategy.

MMT is simply a description of how money and the banking system works. It doesn’t matter what the leaders and economists believe though, the central bank will behave as described in their operating protocol and the politicians and economists cannot change that.

As an analogy, I don’t understand how exactly does a computer work - but every time I type the key “a” on my keyboard, the character “a” will show up on the screen. I cannot change that, no matter what my beliefs are, unless I invent a new type of computer that operates with a different set of logic.

The mainstream economists don’t understand how the system works, that’s why they keep fumbling and get it wrong. No matter how hard they try, the national debt isn’t going to make the US go bankrupt.

The only way the US leaders can reduce the national debt is if the government taxes more than it spends, so either increase taxes, or reduce spending.

And yet despite all the DOGE cuts, and all the freezing of federal funds, total government outlays continue to rise in FY2025. In the first 100 days, Trump’s deficit spending is $200 billion more than the previous year:

Unless Trump rams through significant budget cuts, or if he lowers interest rates where interest income payment can no longer support the strong deficits the government is running, the national debt will continue to go up.

The problem with the US is not that the government isn’t spending enough, it is that the spending isn’t being distributed to the working people who need it the most.

Win-win for both US and China. The new status quo.

If the US succeeds in shifting its export of dollar from running trade deficit into foreign investment, then in principle, the US gets to preserve its dollar hegemony while also allowing it to reduce its trade deficits. The US wants to have its cake and eats it too (although whatever contradictions that might arise from this, I don’t know).

China gets foreign investment to save its failing property and stock market prices (which they believe that, when stabilized, could encourage domestic consumption), and as offsets to its dwindling export revenues. If my prediction is correct, the Fed will lower the interest rate come June (as part of the deal) as inflation eases, and Chinese banks will then lower their rates and alleviate the massive overhanging local government debts. China’s economy gets stabilized, and it continues to develop/alleviate poverty as before.

The losers are Europe and the Global South.

Europe now faces a very difficult dilemma. The US tariff rate on China determines how much Chinese goods are dumped into Europe and elsewhere. If Europe lets cheap Chinese goods enter its market freely, then say goodbye to its domestic industries. If Europe goes protectionist and enacts tariffs against Chinese goods, its high energy input prices (thanks to Nord Stream bombing) have already made its exports uncompetitive, and this will kill off its growth trajectory.

It’s lose-lose for Europe, and opens them up to making a deal with Trump.

The US tariff imposed on China is like the valve on a gas stove with Europe being boiled, and just the possibility of US raising tariff rate against China [is enough to make the Euros tremble(https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-15/eu-economy-chief-urges-china-self-restraint-on-diverting-goods). Still being defiant and don’t want to make a deal? I’ll turn up the temperature (more Chinese goods being dumped into Europe) and see if you’ll start feeling the pain?

Europe will probably end up with unfavorable bargains, being forced to purchase US goods while selling off their high tech industries. This will allow Trump to claim trade deficit reduction, while the US acquires key European technologies and industries without having to reindustrialize themselves.

For the Global South, this is of course a massive loss of opportunity to escape from the yokes of Western imperialism. I have written at length how China can run a Marshall Plan with Chinese characteristics to create an alternative economic bloc, so won’t be repeating it here.

Instead, the sword of Damocles hangs over every exporter economy in the Global South. If the US reduces import (either by raising tariffs, or the US goes into recession itself), then everyone will have to compete with China to export their goods to an ever smaller slice of market, and they will lose. Failing businesses cause local recessions, priming those countries for harvest by global financial capital and institutions like the IMF.

The “export-led growth” model that many countries, especially in Asia, adopted, can only work when there is a country willing to permanently run a large deficits to import from them. This is simply the outcome of how the world’s economy has been shaped over the past 50 years.

Over the longer term, the US seeks to dominate over the global supply chain. The US reshapes the global supply chain by buying up the failing assets across the Global South.

So, no, jobs aren’t coming back to the US. And no, imports will continue to enter the US, because there is nowhere else for them to go.

US finance capital may also start buying up Chinese businesses that have been failing under intense competition (for example, the solar panel industries have been eating huge losses last year, and many smaller EV companies are imploding). China won’t let the US touch the major corporations and the key industries, but the US can still acquire the many thousands of intermediate suppliers and the cutting edge technologies of the smaller Chinese companies that are going out of business under intense competition.

This is why I keep saying that the only way to break this nefarious plan is for China to step up, raise the wages of the Chinese working class such that they have the purchasing power to absorb the surplus export capacity of the Global South. If that happens, then nobody will have to export stuff to the US anymore, and it will become the biggest loser.

News from May 16th:

U.S. business community hoped to further promote China-U.S. common interests: Chinese VP (Xinhua)
(Official readout from People’s Daily, in Chinese)

BEIJING, May 16 (Xinhua) – Chinese Vice President Han Zheng on Friday expressed hope that the business community of the United States will play a greater role in promoting bilateral relations and the common interests of both countries.

Han made the remarks when meeting with Invesco Chairperson Richard Wagoner in Beijing, saying that China and the United States share extensive common interests and have ample room for cooperation.

The economic and trade talks between the two countries have recently made substantial progress, Han said, adding that the two countries should properly resolve differences and frictions in economic and trade cooperation through equal dialogue.

He said China will actively draw on the development experience of the international capital market and accelerate the reform of its capital market that suits China’s national conditions.

As a long-term participant in China’s capital market, Invesco is welcome to continue to strengthen cooperation with China, Han added.

Hailing China’s tremendous development achievement, Wagoner said Invesco and the U.S. business community were delighted to see the substantial progress made at the U.S.-China economic and trade talks, and pledged to continue exploring the Chinese market and contribute to U.S.-China economic and trade cooperation.

As predicted, China is opening up to American finance capital.

I already said that this was likely part of deal during the negotiations.

Moody’s downgrade just caused 30-year treasury yield to spike? Already over. Didn’t even last 24 hours lol.

Once again the market panics over something so inconsequential.

Here’s the MMT lesson for the day:

I think I answered one of your questions before, but let’s put it this way: what can the individual countries actually do?

Very few countries can survive US sanctions. Unless you’re prepared to go the way of North Korea and Venezuela and the likes, and have the full backing of your own people ready to go through hell with you, you’d better not attract any attention to yourself, and chances are you’d end up a failed state like Libya where everything descends to chaos and having millions and millions of people of your own end up impoverished, just to save two million Palestinian lives?

This is simply the outcome of the world letting US and China to run a huge trade imbalances over the past few decades. By concentrating all industrial capacity in China, the rest of the world are made vulnerable to Western imperialism. This was a very deliberate imperial strategy by the US, and not a mistake like many people are saying.

Europe was never going to take the Palestinian side, save a couple of countries, but even if they wanted to, they are now heavily reliant on US energy to survive, and is in austerity itself.

Russia is already having its hands full dealing with Ukraine, and could barely do any power projection itself. Just look at how it lost Syria. And Putin was literally begging for everyone to de-dollarize since 2022 (to a certain extent, Lula did too), and many countries in the Global South was looking for a dollar alternative during the summer of 2022, but unfortunately China chose not to take up the offer and instead doubled down on defending dollar hegemony. This was a huge opportunity that is now forever lost. Russia’s not going to lose the war or anything, but that economic transformation is not happening anytime soon.

And obviously China is way too comfortable to abandon the status quo. After all, both the US and China have been the greatest beneficiaries of the dollar hegemony.

It is apparent that Trump is allowed to have his nonsense tariffs precisely because they have already seen how the world (mostly China) reacted to Russia’s call for de-dollarization after the Ukraine war started, and are calculating on the fact that nothing will fundamentally change. Looks like they’re winning that bet too.

Even Trump’s crazy tariffs could not replicate the dangers the US dollar faced when it first raised interest rates in 2022. That really was an opportunity that only happens once every few decades.

To put it bluntly, Russia (February 24th 2022) and the Palestinians (October 7th 2023) rolled their dice, and they lost the ultimate bet. The world lost an opportunity for an alternative system to emerge.

There is no point sugar coating anymore. Remember that human agency is the one to change the world. The left has to be at the vanguard of the movement. But are we even prepared? Has the left studied and devised its theory, strategy and tactics to the point where they are prepared to take on the rise of fascism?

We can only wait for the next crisis of capitalism to erupt. But even if it does happen tomorrow, is anyone even prepared to take action?

The US government’s willingness to run huge deficits (which increases the national debt) is what makes it so powerful and holds so much sway over the developing world in the first place.

Remember, that you cannot run large budget deficits is a neoclassical myth designed to keep the rest of the world from investing in self-sufficiency, and must therefore earn export revenues (by using their labor and resources to sell cheap goods and services to the wealthy countries) first before they can invest in their own country in order to “keep their deficits down”.

US federal debt = dollars spent by the US government that haven’t been taxed back yet. It literally is just an accounting tool to drain the extra reserves creating in the financial system every time the government spends money.

This MMT meme should clarify everything:

Leftists really need to understand that they should attack the federal government for prioritizing its spending on rich people, and not enough on the average working people, instead of regurgitating neoliberal myths that perpetuate the US hegemony.

Also, the Mongols.

The Kievan Rus was geographically unfortunate enough to stand in between the Mongol invasion and the rest of Europe in the 13th century, and the Russian/Eastern Slavic people spent the next four centuries on a stalemate with the descendants of the Mongols (Tatars), became the victims and captured slaves of frequent Tatar raids that went on for centuries, while effectively shielding the European subcontinent from total destruction.

Edit: obviously the Islamic civilizations were destroyed during the Mongol invasion and China itself suffered from both an external invasion and internal political upheaval until the Ming dynasty in the 15th century.

You used it correctly haha. Not just that, a large part of the academic circle as well. The mentality is slowly changing since Trump, but the academic/institutional culture will move slower for sure.