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In this mailing:
by Gordon G. Chang
• November 22, 2015 at 5:00 am
- One statistic
summarizes the situation: in Q3, there was $460.6 billion of net
capital outflow. No economy can survive outflows of that size. The
Chinese economy has never made sense, but confidence held it together.
Now, the confidence is gone.
- There are
indications that China's economic growth rate is, in reality, close to
zero. Take the most reliable indicator of Chinese economic activity,
the consumption of electricity.
- China's Communist
Party has been closing off the Chinese market to foreigners,
recombining large state enterprises back into formal monopolies,
increasing state ownership of enterprises, and shoveling more state
subsidies to favored market participants.
- Just about
everyone correctly agrees that a new round of structural economic
reform could restart growth.
"On conservative growth projections, China's economy could well
be bigger than the sum of all the G7 economies in real terms within the
next decade," writes Peter Drysdale, the editor of the popular East
Asia Forum website.
Not everyone is as optimistic as Drysdale, but the general view is
that China will work through a transitory period and enter a new phase of
growth powered by consumer spending.
Are China's economic problems merely temporary -- a year or two at
most -- as the majority view suggests?
Perhaps, but there are also reasons to believe the country will have
to endure prolonged hardship, either two or so decades of recession and
stagnation or, more probably, a sharp 1930s-style crash followed by years
of deep contraction.
by Burak Bekdil
• November 22, 2015 at 4:00 am
- The law stated
that the homes and workplaces of those non-Muslims who could not
afford the tax would be sequestered.
- Under the AKP
rule, Turkey's dwindling Jewish community, now at around a mere
17,000, as well as other non-Muslims, have come under systematic
intimidation from government politicians and bureaucrats. These
non-Muslim minorities are also often the targets of racist attacks.
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Ishak Alaton (left), a 90-year-old Turkish Jewish
industrialist, is being investigated on charges of "supporting
terror," for providing financial and moral support to Fethullah
Gulen (right), a U.S.-based Muslim cleric who is a political rival of
Turkey's president.
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It was 1942 when, one day, Hayim Alaton, a Jewish yarn importer in
Istanbul, received two payment notices from the tax office: He was asked to
pay 80,000 liras in total -- a fortune at that time. He ran to the tax
office to object, but was told to pay the whole amount within 15 days. It
was the infamous Wealth Tax, passed on Nov. 11, 1942 and it remained in
effect for a year and a half until it was repealed on March 14, 1944.
The Wealth Tax exclusively targeted Turkey's non-Muslims at a time when
300,000 Orthodox Greeks and 100,000 Jews were living in Istanbul (where
total population was one million). The law stated that the homes and
workplaces of those non-Muslims who could not afford the tax would be
sequestered. Alaton was able to pay no more than 11,000 liras. That was the
start of "black years," as Alaton's son, 15 years old at that
time, would later recall.
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