Behavior like that in the higher levels of the business, it why a crunch hits that business in the first place. Consider it a favor if you are given walking papers from a place like that.

business is FOR-PROFIT. period. If you are working someplace that gives a shit about how big your friends list is internally, instead of how much money you are making for the company, that company is not going to be around much longer after they let you go.

Props to you for admitting that.

Personally, I do not trust Friedmans intentions here. He would be happier than ever to see a fragmented political party on the progressive side. With this editorial of his, he is is appearing to be goading conservatives to get involved in this 'new party'. However, what I seem him doing is more along the lines of indirectly goading the liberal/progressive side by saying 'more conservatives need to be involved in this', therefore directing the attention of the progressives into this sham to counter the perceived possibility of an influx of conservatives because that is what he says needs to happen, and attempting to fragment their attention to more easily allow a conservative victory in other areas.

I also do not believe in the labels I am using above, but he does, and this is what I see him attempting to do here.

No, he is a moron for other reasons.

He has been around for awhile, and is most notably known for his constant claiming that the war in Iraq would be over in 'another six months'... for a period of almost a year and a half. Among many other asinine proclamations, that he then would proceed to announce how awesome he was because his insights would be coming true and 'then you will all see how smart I am'. You go right ahead and google the phrase 'Friedman Unit', and then come back and tell us he is not a moron with references why that would be true in any way.

Credibility is not something Friedman has much of. He is most certainly not 'challenging the norm'. He is an arrogant gasbag, and has been for over a decade.

Yes, and I wouldn't expect that to change, any more than I expect AM radio to not be dominated by conservatives.

Granted, this story is written by the guy who was able to bless the world with a unit of time measurement that has since been named after him; Friedman Unit He doesn't exactly have a good track record in predicting future events, much less future political events.

Yes. Because this is just about the first lessons learned by anyone who has ever traded a financial instrument of some sort. There is even a easy to remember phrase associated with the idea;
If you don't take your profits, someone else will

Yes!

You get treated the way you allow yourself to get treated.

Leverage for a typical residential property in the US was at 30:1, not 3:1. You are using the term leverage incorrectly in that sense. A FHA loan, or one insured by Fannie Mae, or Freddie Mac required 3% down, for property up to $725K(depending on the market area). This is actually a 33:1 leverage at the max in this example. For every $1 you put down, you get $33 in property value. So, by putting down $3000, you could have bought a $100,000 house. In your example, you are using a completely different metric, that only applies to the structure of the US economy of income per year/total price. That is only a ratio because of the externalities that are unique to the US, our tax structure, out transportation infrastructure, etc...

Again, the structure is MUCH different in China. The last time I looked closely at it, those loans in China that you are referring to were only given to people where their employer participated in the loan process. In this setup, up to 8% of the persons wages were directly deposited into the company fund, to then be given as loans to its employees. The interest rates for these loans were also at lower rates than one could get on the open market. This was because the company as well as the worker had a direct interest in the success of the loan.

Seriously, I can not stress this enough. The two economies are MUCH different, and to directly compare them as you are attempting to do is very very incorrect.

It is not easy to dive into the world of finance, and I can assure you that I have spent much more time than you dealing with these setups, although I do not do it anymore.

As for the benefits of high speed rail. When the price of oil gets high enough(and it will, there is not an infinite supply of it) the cost to fly will greatly exceed the price to take rail. Until we can power jet aircraft with nuclear power(or coal powered electric), there is an end of life coming for the efficiency of flight over rail. Is that end of life coming soon? probably not. But much like the building out of the housing infrastructure while the money is available, building out the rail infrastructure while the money is easily flowing in is also a very wise forward looking plan. The US just can not look that far ahead, and all you need to do is look at the state of our current infrastructure. There are tens of thousands of current bridges that are just about to collapse, and one recently did in a nearby town to me, closing a fairly well traveled artery. The US isn't even able to handle it's current infrastructure, much less plan out in any meaningful way to expand it effectively.

The money will not be flowing into China forever, and they know it. They are taking full advantage of the current situation, and when the funds dry up for construction, they will already have hard assets in place to use, instead of sitting on their thumbs(like we in the US are currently) when the banks simply won't lend out any money. The plan is that they will be more able to support their economy with internal wealth, than external. Money if very fluid, and can go away overnight(the asian crisis of the 90s showed this quite well), but large infrastructure projects will always be there as an asset to the country that hosts them. Building them out now is simply the best option to take, and they are wasting no time doing it.

That is an incredibly shallow point of view.

In 10 years, your business deals with a major Chinese manufacturer. You and your competitor are up bidding on the same major project. You didn't bother to learn Chinese because you thought it was worthless, but your competitor did because he understands not only the language, but the culture.

Your competitor is able to talk to the internal departments in their native tongue, and you are not. If you have been in the three-letter business world longer than a few minutes, you know that form and tact are VERY important aspects of your success in a global market.

You don't get the contract, but you don't care because you are accustomed to the life you have grown up living, and would rather stick with what you know to your grave, then change with the world around you. Not everyone is going to succeed, and the old phrase in the last century was 'the world still needs ditch-diggers', to which the new equivalent will be, well the world still needs mono-lingustic people.

Three networks are planned, with the Britain to China route to be extended to Singapore, and built within a decade.

Passengers on a second route would travel to the north of China and through Russia and on to Germany, where the network would join the European railway system.

A third network would extend south through Vietnam, Thailand, Burma and Malaysia

You can read about it http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/china-to-build-highspeed-rail-link-to-europe-20100309-pvuf.html there, among any other place that has a financial interest in keeping a close eye on these things

Watch the videos others are posting about the ghost cities.

Slashdot is not usually the place I gather my financial information from, especially when 90% of them are links to the same series of videos from one source, who just happens to be selling its own financial advice.

Frankly, if your only evidence is youtube links from other people whos only exposure to this economy is from stories they have read fed out through 'other' investment houses with their own book to sell, your opinion is less than worthless. I never said there weren't ghost cities, I never said they were only on the interior of the country, and I never said they had sane lending policies. I said they have RELATIVELY saner lending practices. There is a reason I use the words I do, and it is because I am trying to point out the difference between the two economies. To give you a car analogy, it is the difference between someone saying that "cars are relatively the same when comparing a Ferrarri to a Kia, and you returning with the counter that it is stupid to claim that a ferrarri is the same as a Kia, when that was explicitly not what was said.

To be blunt, I don't think you have the background to understand what the differences are between China and the US, mainly because your sourcing things like youtube videos and not an analysis of your spreadsheets comparing negative interest rates, and internal lending requirements. If you are seriously interested, you need to understand why the western media has been running stories about 'the bubble' in China for the better part of this century. The point is to try to influence decision makers by introducing a sense of uncertainty and risk, by trying to compare apples to oranges, to influence the decision making process of those who make the important decisions within companies.

Here's a link from 2006 saying the same thing;
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2943687/China-grows-by-11pc-as-fears-of-bubble-deepen.html

The previous year, 2005;
http://www.globegazette.com/news/opinion/article_1e59656c-273e-5889-abf9-62e64c19b88b.html

How about 2003;
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=LXc0AAAAIBAJ&sjid=rI4EAAAAIBAJ&pg=6557,627471&dq=china+bubble&hl=en

I have been involved with some financial entities, and this was part of my research for many years, going back further than a decade. It is quite clear to me that there is a bias, and honestly this is to be understood easily when you understand the way that money flows. Money doesn't give a shit what youtube videos you post, all it cares about is where it is easiest to move to, and more importantly to move OUT. Like I said, I have been hearing this story for a decade, and when you can pull your nationalistic ego out of the equation, you will find it easy to understand why you keep reading stories in the 'regular' news that your system is the best, and this system is just bound for failure.

In a way, the US is. China has the ability to artificially peg is currency in a way that is more beneficial to them, than it is to the people lending them money. No other major world economy enjoys this benefit, and they are taking full advantage of it.

As to the problem of empty buildings, many of the empty buildings are nothing more than concrete shells waiting to have the final build out done. The manpower needed to clean any needed upkeep greatly dwarfs the manpower needed to build it. It is far better to have the infrastructure already in place and clean it, than not to have it in place and then have to deal with things like ghettos, and unbalanced infrastructure needs. Once you fall behind in that respect, the cost to bring an area 'back' to where you want it to be is many orders of magnitude greater than the initial outlay.

Want to see some large vacant areas right here in the US? Visit the large 'Manhattan West' development in Las Vegas. It is almost completely empty. That is just one of many developments. Who pays for it? Well, the bank writes it off against their loan-loss reserves, and then gets to spread that loss out to offset any profits over the next x number of years.

banking is a little strange when you fully bury your nose in it, and many, MANY things are almost counter-intuitive if its not your usual line of work. Even when it was involved in my normal line of work, there were still some areas that defied my understanding..Either way, Im not anywhere near that field anymore, and couldn't be happier about that.

As I said, I am not an expert nor am I silly enough to say this will al just somehow work out great for China. But if I had to put money on them, I would be leaning more to it working out for them as a whole. Mainly because they will do whatever is needed to accomplish that. And that involves some rather ugly things that would never be allowed to happen in a western-style democracy without heads literally rolling. Our banking system shenanigans would have ended with state sponsored beheadings in public, and China is also able to very specifically adjust its currency peg in a way that will soften the blow to them more than any other economy would be able to. This has some downsides, and I think one of the major risks is that they get too accustomed to this setup, and push it right to the edge-conditions, leaving them just as vulnerable as their western counterparts. However, they are not near that point... yet.

Not that you don't bring up some good points but consider this slightly re-worded sentence you wrote;

Everything I'm reading in English says they are dangerously close to bursting

Some of their other infrastructure is coming in the form of high speed rail, with many parts of it functioning already. Rail links to the rest of Europe are already planned and being built. While there may be ghost cities right now, the 'plan' is to have the infrastructure in place for the hordes coming in from the rural areas, to avoid such nasty things like 'tin shack villages' and overcrowding becoming commonplace, like many other countries have experienced when population growth far exceeded the ability of local infrastructure to be built.

I think it is hard for many westerners to really understand what is going on in many parts of China. The growth that was once limited to coastal cities, is spreading into more central locations of the country, to take advantage of the population distribution. Human rights, and pollution controls aside(and those really are BIG things to us, and rightfully so), they are absolutely doing almost a perfect job of bringing their country into a more-than-modern era.

As far as them 'busting'. The likelihood of that happening is much smaller than it was here, or in any of the problem EU countries like greece, portugal, iceland, and italy. Why? They actually have rather sane lending policies when it comes to housing. I have been hearing the line that there is a bubble in China for just about a decade now, mainly from westerners who think that their lending practices closely match ours(they don't), and just by looking at the growth similarities, a parallel is able to be drawn to our meteoric rise, and subsequent fall(it isn't) in real estate.

It has been about 5 years since I looked when I last heard this same 'rumor' of a bubble going around since I really looked at the financial requirements and legal framework, and I do imagine some of that has changed(possibly the restriction on second homes was lifted in that time, Im not sure), but there are a LOT of reasons why what appears to be a bubble in China, is only a buibble when looked at through the experience of western eyes. I won't say something stupid like 'it's different this time', but there are serious structural and behavioral differences that make a comparison between our two economies incredibly hard to do without spending a large portion of your waking hours immersing yourself in the differences between the frameworks of the two systems.

End result, learn Chinese. Worst case, you expand your knowledge. Best case, you(more likely your children) don't become a slave.

I have a well for my house, with a commercial reverse osmosis filtering system. So no, I don't realize that.

Aside from that, most of the cities around me get their drinking water directly from Lake Michigan. The 'sewage' that you mention gets treated and sold as 'soil' at the local home improvement store after being mixed with sand to prevent clumping. The fluid component also gets treated and sent off to agriculture where it is used as fertilizer. Any other reclaimed water is used mainly for irrigation or industrial uses, and not drinking water.

You only have a surface understanding of these processes, and it doesn't apply to very many actual cities, and millions of people. In actuality, there are probably only a few thousand people in the US who directly get drinking water from treated sewage like you describe.

Personally, my next position pays 8% more than the previous one that I left.

Just about the ONLY people who are taking a 'step down' like this are the real estate agents who were part of the building of the last bubble in the first place. Did you ever think they were being overpaid in the first place, and now the market has adjusted down to more correctly reflect their skill set?

This is true

OHHHH... this guy eh? Let me go look closer at his data then...

Well look at that, he decided to cherry pick his data to only a few weeks before the incident to use as his 'comparison'. Going back further, even only as far back as he then goes forwards, shows no such spike at all, and it becomes clear that the normal fluctuation of the rate of infant mortality falls within the bands being described. Suddenly, the weeks afterwards just seem to be regular background noise of the data. But, only going back a few weeks before, and cutting off the results immediately prior to that where the data doesn't fit the angle you are trying to sell, (usually called cherry-picking the data) suddenly shows this 'drastic' 35% increase.

The guy is a shill, and if you would have done the ACTUAL FUCKING MATH yourself, you would know that. Instead, you just looked around until you found someone that did the right cherry-picking of data to fit your already pre-conceived notions of what you think should be happening.

Math is hard, posting links is easy. Going forward, it will be best for you to assume that if you aren't going to do the math yourself and understand any possible flaws in the means taken to gather those numbers, it is very likely you will be lied to without knowing it.

That is rather disingenuous, and I think you know it.

'Tornadoes', here in the US, are graded on a 5 level scale, from EF0 through EF5.

An EF-0 tornado has winds between 65-85mph(105-135km/h). The strongest tornado to hit the UK in the past 200 years was the equivalent to an EF-2(93 and 130mph). A basic, run of the mill winter storm, has stronger gusts in the UK on a yearly basis. Here in the US, there are residential stick houses that could functionally survive the worst tornado the UK has seen in modern times.

To not design a nuclear reactor to even minimally survive winds that houses in the US could survive, is not a realistic problem. It would never happen. I would go so far as to say it is almost impossible, unless you plan to build your reactors out of 1x2 stick wood-frame buildings. A metal shed with aluminum supports would be enough in 99% of the cases. Moving to concrete, even non-reenforced, would bring that to 100%. To avoid any possible problems, add in some re-bar, and I would feel perfectly safe living right next door to a nuclear plant that would take a direct hit, when it comes to the strength of the tornadoes in the UK.

Being afraid of the word 'tornado' makes no more sense than being afraid of the word 'nuclear'. It arouses fear in people who do not understand it, but the mechanics and consequences can be easily comprehended and dealt with by those who do.

*I've been directly under an EF-5 tornado in my past, that obliterated everything above ground level, as well as watching a EF-0 roll right through my front yard from my living room window. It would be foolish to fear them both in the same way, just as it is foolish to fear anything with the word nuclear in it.