Comment by mikewarot
11 hours ago
I think this could be the thing that finally pops the AI circular financing bubble, leading to World Depression II. I'm not sure either of the existing 2 faces of the duopoly infesting politics will survive, and there's a non-zero chance this breaks civilization as supply chains collapse, and we enter a new dark ages.
> leading to World Depression II
This is very, very unlikely. The US would probably suffer more, given how much AI related expenditure there is. The EZ mostly wouldn't notice, and China is already basically in a depression that it's desperately trying to export its way out of (which seems unlikely without them doing something about all the underwater property debt).
> China is already basically in a depression You gotta expand on that, chief.
So, their property sector essentially collapsed from 2019-21, vaporising much of the wealth possessed by many Chinese people (who were often buying expensive flats of the plans).
As a result of this many local government pushed money into car/electronics/whatever export industries. This lead to vicious competition, and many of the exporters are tapped out of Chinese markets (vicious competition) so they are attempting to export as much as possible (which is rational).
Looking at things more broadly, one could argue that lots of the reason for the vicious competition is precisely that many Chinese people are still in loads of debt from the property bust (much like Irish/Greek/Spanish people were after their property busts).
The central government is pushing the exporting companies hard, as they don't want to have to inject loads of money into the economy (apart from local support of exporters).
This makes sense from the government perspective as they want to be able to build everything that they need (so the US/EU can't screw them), but it's pretty bad for the chinese people, many of whom are not spending (there's been some deflation over the past 5 years).
So, in many ways the Chinese economy is not in a good state, even lots of the exporters/industrial companies are doing badly, hence why they are focusing on exports.
And because Xi is basically leader for life, the likelihood is that these policies won't change until he dies.