Last year, China had 670 lenders close, which is roughly 25% of its banks.... that is a wild, mind-blowing number compared to the U.S., which just has a handful a year....
The rating agency said the return on assets among rural banks fell to 0.45% in the first half, down from 0.56% in 2021. Meanwhile, non-performing loans among such lenders rose to 2.8% in the same period, ahead of the sector average of 1.5%, with greater exposure to smaller companies, property developers and local government funding vehicles.
Seems like China is trying to get ahead of this given the economic slowdown they are facing.
I haven’t been paying close attention to China. Are they still going through a deflationary period?
Yes their productive sectors are still producing everything from toothbrushes to drone parts more efficiently than the west.
China won the trade war.
USA cannot make more Interceptors because Xi has sanctioned supply of refined rare earths to US military related entities due to repeated US war crimes including kidnapping and assassination of the leaders of important Chinese trading partners.
Nobody wants to buy the USTs of an empire in terminal decline that has lost control of strategic shipping routes.
Gulf states are reportedly paying Iran 10-20% cargo value fee for shuttle tankers transiting Hormuz.
So there ARE tankers transiting Hormuz now? Where's the evidence for that? Not challenging, just curious.
I’ve seen that too. It’s still much more limited than the fully open Straight.
I have been following this closely and was wondering given the boasts from Central Command that volumes going through the Strait had returned to higher levels than before the war yet Iran seemed to not be doing anything much to stop these alleged flows - the likelihood that Iran have been collecting fees for safe passage would explain a lot...and is supported by the comments from industry insiders.
It is even possible that some Iranian oil is getting through 'under US protection' using the other gulf states shuttle tankers.
The entire gulf is sick to death of the US coming in a supporting Israels Greater Israel expansion and genocide and may be much better off with a regional consortium managing their own security and the US petrodollar empire butting out.
But the problem for Trump is if the US loses its petrodollar hegemony-extraordinary privilege USA and its citizens will swiftly be insolvent.
So there is an unholy alliance, for now at least, between the Zionists criminal land grabbing Greater Israel agenda genocide and a declining petrodollar empire clinging to its trade routes and payments protocols hegemony.
Gas prices certainly aren’t back to pre-blockade levels, so I remain skeptical.
China was playing a major role in holding prices down because they do not want wider global demand for their products to decline but apparently they are now not so prepared to continue that role.
This article explains some of the logic behind it.
Another example of the strategic importance of state directed planning in a competitive world.
How Xi Jinping Turned Oil From a Weakness Into a Geopolitical Weapon
https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-oil-market-edf57588
Full article free of paywall-
https://archive.ph/2qbzz
Before the U.S. attacked Iran, Beijing spent years and tens of billions of dollars amassing the world’s biggest stockpile of oil. Now, with the conflict likely to last for some time, those reserves have given China huge power over the global oil market—and a critical new defense against the West.
By some estimates, China’s reserves last year were nearly 600 million barrels bigger than those in the U.S. That stockpile allowed it to dramatically slash its oil imports when the war broke out, keeping a lid on global oil prices and safeguarding its own economy.
It has been a major vindication for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who has sought to buttress China against what he sees as a hostile U.S.-led West. For decades, Chinese leaders have worried about the country’s heavy reliance on imported crude, most of which transits through straits that the U.S. or other militaries could seek to block in a conflict.
Now, the Iran crisis has demonstrated that China’s muscular energy policy has afforded Beijing a major tool it could use, for instance, in a war over Taiwan.
The Iran war shows that “against the backdrop of the world entering a new period of turbulence and transformation, localized regional conflicts are no longer confined to a specific locale,” researchers at a think tank under state-owned China National Petroleum wrote this spring. “China’s energy sector must maintain bottom-line and extreme-scenario thinking.”
Crisis management
China’s stockpiles, combined with its quicker-than-expected shift away from fossil fuels, are making it the most powerful swing buyer in global energy markets. It has slashed imports aggressively, which has prevented crude prices from jumping higher. Chinese crude oil imports fell 23% from March to July versus a year earlier.
As the crisis in Iran unfolded, in China, “almost from day one there was this sense that, ‘We are able to manage this. We don’t need to panic,’ ” said Erica Downs, a scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy....
To be sure, analysts and economists say China, which relied on imports for 70% of its crude oil supply before the war, can’t keep imports this low forever. The longer that flows through the Strait of Hormuz remain constrained, the more officials will have to balance economic growth with ensuring oil stockpiles don’t fall too much. But they disagree on when China will start buying more crude, and how much.
Mind you China is screaming over its oil reserves that are now in critical levels while the U.S. government levels are low but the company levels and near record highs. Starting in January those record highs are being added to the government reserves as the drawdown on average had companies returning 1.2 barrels for ever 1 barrel taken out.
The US has zero problems. We have the moral high ground. Communism is evil.
You can deny reality, but that does not change reality.
Without the petrodollar extraordinary privilege USA is Broke.
The Zionist parasites are bleeding you dry.
Suez - Hormuz = End of Empire.
https://www.wsj.com/business/logistics/shippers-are-offering-sailors-up-to-25-000-a-trip-to-sneak-oil-out-of-the-gulf-712d5bd7?
https://archive.ph/1sCtn
What's the view inside the Capitol? Does economic turmoil in China make America safer or more at risk?
It’s pretty mixed from what I’ve seen.
China has a metric shit load of issues from youth unemployment to the collapse of the housing sector and there is a concern that if it gets to bad it could cause a world wide issue. Kinda like 2008 did to the world.
Others see it as an opportunity for the U.S. and allies to capitalize on China cracking and having to deal on internal issues.
To me there are still enough industries that the world, Africa and Europe, depend on that makes a wonky China an issue for everyone else since there is such a dependence. Granted it is fading and countries are dismantling the Chinese dependence but for now it remains.
By the year 2000, there were 8,300 banks in the United States, and that number was cut in half by 2022, with only 4,706 banks still standing.
'Israeli forces will continue to operate in southern Syria
The Israeli army says it intends to continue operations in southern Syria in order to “remove any threat” posed to its citizens.
A military statement claimed troops located three anti-tank munitions and two land mines in the area. Israeli forces killed a Syrian man in southern Syria on Sunday.
Construction of Israel’s Sufa 53 military line in Syria is continuing. It is a road, berm and trench that Israel has been building in the Quneitra governorate since 2022.
**Turkiye, Qatar, Jordan and Kuwait have condemned Israel’s illegal occupation and expansionism.**
Ibrahim Olabim, Syria’s permanent representative to the UN, told the UN Security Council last month that Israeli aggression poses “the greatest threat facing the stability of the entire region, not just Syria”.'
AlJazeera,com
'Michelle Brohard, head of policy and geopolitical risk at Kpler, recently said some countries could be paying Iran for passage through the Strait of Hormuz.
“I suspect there is a toll that’s being paid, which is giving these ships safe passage,” she said in an interview last week with energy analyst Rory Johnston. “I also suspect that these countries know that this is unsustainable from a perspective of [the] US escorting [ships], and also unsustainable from them paying Iran 10 percent of their cargo, or 20 percent of their cargo.”'
Suez-Hormuz-end of empire.
Chinese banks, politicians and monetary system are not owned and controlled by Zionist war criminals.
USAs are.
USA complicit in Greater Israel War Crimes and the global fiat debt slavery petrodollar empire.