Interestingly while Bloomberg suspended this reporter; prepares to lay off 50 people [1]; and possibly shutter its investigations division [2], [3], there is "good" news too: 'NewCo', the Pierre Omidyar-Glenn Greenwald news venture just brought on board NYU's Jay Rosen.
China is now such a big market and a big power that every industries, countries downplay any criticism. I think one of the biggest example is Hollywood, it has long gone the time where there was movies on the Tibet, now Hollywood is even making special versions of its movies to include few minutes with chinese actors (see Iron Man 3).
The difference is Japan had it's own industry right from the start,it was its way,like Germany to be proud again after WW2.
It was not american brands manifacturing goods in Japan, it was Japan copying US products and selling them at a cheaper price, with an acceptable quality.
I remember Japan running rings around US products from a quality standpoint, not just being "acceptable." This is quite unlike China where the default quality is crap (though you CAN get good quality from Chinese manufacturing, you have to demand it and do your own QA to be sure you're getting it).
You might want to rethink your opinion on this. It's much more accurate to say that the default quality that most outsourcers are willing to pay for is crap. It comes down to going for the lowest price and poor description of requirements from overseas.
The last few years I've been getting tons of small-run, custom manufactured goods from China, ranging from custom keyboards (and CNC'd aluminum cases for them), custom electronics (mostly routers), to handcrafted belts and tailored clothes. All of them are of absolutely outstanding quality and all of the communication I've seen demonstrates some incredibly skilled craftsmen who take pride in their products.
A lot of the knowledge/experience is gone from US manufacturing.
Once they figure out customer service (which is generally poor, but good with some shops), you're going to see a lot more people doing what I've been doing.
I own an X1 Carbon, its ok but still only half as good as the fruit. Living in china, I'm not sure what is made and designed here that I would say is really quality....mauve noodles?
It has been this way for 10 years already. Nobody's complaining about China anymore in the mass media or hollywood, the whole western economy relies on china's manufacturing capabilities.
Good for china , bad for most of us, because there is a hidden cost to all these cheap stuffs , it's called debt.
We could build stuff so people can actually afford it, instead of working at McDonalds or Walmart for a minimum wage, but it's not profitable enough in a world of short term profit.
You have it backwards. The US and Europe can source their cheap products from many locations in Asia, while China is very reliant on the EU and US economies to keep buying their stuff.
China is not 1,1 billion new consumers. It's a 200 million people extension of the western economy with 900 million people in Africa level poverty.
And despite this massive human surplus wages keep rising because even assembling an iPhone is relatively hard.
And soon other Asian countries will start doing it cheaper. If that happens, China has a huge industrial plant with no internal market to afford it.
Also, the average profit of Chinese exports is just 1.7%. So basically the Chinese made massive investments based on a projection of export demand that lasts long enough for sustainable internal demand to catch up. When the discount rate turns out to be a bit higher than expected, the house of cards falls.
Think of China as the Groupon of nations.
The smart Chinese elite is also buying foreign assets as fast as they can. Like insider stock trades, when a management of a country starts divesting, that's a sign of troubles, not of wealth.
This is not to say the Chinese elite was wrong to grow via market liberation and exports. What I do say is that the bulls on China conflate revenues with profits, and activity with lasting competitive advantages.
It also means the Chinese are buying US debt not to enslave the US (hard to do that with zero procent interest rates!), but as a favor to their largest client base.
Automation is a big unknown facing Chinese manufacturing. Eventually the West will have robotic lines that can manufacture iPhones cheaper than Chinese laborers. When, and what happens next, is anyone's guess.
China is unlikely to be left too far behind in any robotic revolution. Foxconn's been building a "million-robot army", likely to build the aforementioned iPhones.
>"Also, the average profit of Chinese exports is just 1.7%"
What is the average net profit margin on American exports? Due to the nature of much of what the Chinese export, we can assume low profit margins, but we need some context for this.
>when a management of a country starts divesting, that's a sign of troubles, not of wealth.
Wealthy countries own vast amounts of foreign assets.
>but as a favor to their largest client base
It isn't a "favor"; Americans purchase Chinese exports with dollars. What else are the Chinese to do with all those dollars? They purchase "risk-free" government bonds. There's no magical arrangement. It's mutually beneficial.
We could build stuff so people can actually afford it
What "stuff" are you talking about? Manufacturing? Because the US actually makes a lot of "stuff", it just doesn't need people to do it, thanks to a lot of engineers like us who have automated it to hell.
That's just the same article on two different websites, stating that a handful of parts on the 777 are manufactured overseas, and the FAA/Boeing needs to do better at QC.
Sure, I'm just saying that you'll be hard pressed to find a product that doesn't have components manufactured overseas.
Even/especially the ones that proudly claim to be "Made in the USA". It doesn't reflect the reality of the global market.
Hell, I know a guy with a gun business who gets all of his parts manufactured overseas, but he's allowed to put "Made in the USA" on them and it's a huge selling point to his customers just because he assembles them in his warehouse himself.
I heard a story recently about a Caterpillar vehicle being made in Mexico.
Headquarters couldn't figure out why the BOM was costing so much, so they flew an engineer down there to figure out what the problem was.
Turns out most of the locally sourced parts and raw materials were being purchased at a significant premium - from friends of some of the local managers.
That's a common scam in large companys a while back I did the course in handling discipline cases in BT (a large telco) and the course tutor commented that corruption in letting relatively small contracts was the most common form of fruad/corruption.
Ie. giving a contract for small civil engineering works to your mate for kickbacks.
Of course in Mexico you run the risk of ending up dead if you dont go along with the scam.
Please take a look at this link. It is definitely "biased" but still accurate. The US is still a major manufacturing hub. Manufacturing makes up 11.9% of US GDP.
>Good for china , bad for most of us, because there is a hidden cost to all these cheap stuffs , it's called debt.
It's not bad for the US because China owns treasuries. They never gave China any leverage over the US.
It's bad because buying those treasuries pushed the value of the dollar up and the yuan down. That's why the pearl river delta is the richest conglomeration of manufacturing industries in the world, and factories are being closed left, right and center in the US.
And one day it will be as hard for the US to bring that manufacturing base home as it was for China to build it up in the first place. That's when the US is really screwed.
So China gets little scraps of paper with numbers written on them, and we get iPods and Nikes. I don't think it's quite as obvious who's winning and who's losing...
I seem to have heard this exact same thing 25 years ago with Japan (that is @camus2's comment, not the FA). At least when Japan was our counterparty they bought real estate and companies and were not so foolish as to buy Treasury bonds.
I can't find any statistics -- my impression was that the US capital account surplus with Japan was more diversified than that with China (though Japan would still hold a substantial chunk in US treasuries.)
As I can't find any stats to back that up, I guess I'll leave it as my possibly untrue impression...
1) There are many lactose-free milk drinks -- from literally "lactose free milk" (milk with lactose removed) to any kind of kefir/yogurt like products.
2) Being lactose intolerant doesn't mean sudden death upon drinking products that contain lactose. In most cases, it means "generic upset stomach" symptoms (that could have any number of causes -- e.g., is it the lactose in the latte, the coffee in the latter, or is it lack of sleep?) with moderate lactose intake or very few or no symptoms when lactose intake is only occasional.
(I'm lactose intolerant, but I didn't actually know this until recently.)
IIRC, the extra Chinese footage in Iron Man 3 was done entirely by the Chinese distributor. Hollywood had nothing to do with it, and even Chinese audiences thought it was an embarrassment.
Yes, Bloomberg the news outlet has no purpose there if they can't report on what's going on. However, Bloomberg the terminal subscription seller (e.g. nearly all the revenue that Bloomberg makes) can remain in China and continue to make money. The market is too large to ignore, at least for Bloomberg.
Isn't one reason that people subscribe to the terminals that they get unfiltered access to the Bloomberg news feed? I know that market data is the primary benefit, but isn't timely access to potentially market-moving news stories a significant secondary benefit? If they start pulling punches in cases like this, how much can you trust the accuracy and completeness of news being delivered over the terminals?
I believe that as a few years ago, Bloomberg had zero terminals in china. I may be wrong, and thing may have changed, but I don't think that china is a big source of revenue for Bloomberg. Of course, I'm not saying that it is not a big potential source of revenue.
> Bloomberg L.P., the parent company of Bloomberg News, receives much of its revenue from selling subscriptions for its financial-information terminals. After Bloomberg News published an article in June 2012 on the family wealth of Xi Jinping, at that time the incoming Communist Party chief, sales of Bloomberg terminals in China slowed, as officials ordered state enterprises not to subscribe. Officials also blocked Bloomberg’s website on Chinese servers, and the company has been unable to get residency visas for new journalists.
If they're not going to report on meaningful things what is the purpose of them still being there then?
If you mean in terms of investigative journalism, probably not much purpose. But if you mean in terms of profits, they could run an inoffensive newswire that just reports on business news without digging too deep into sensitive subjects like corruption.
Funny how news organizations don't like when employees leak internal information. I'm all for whistleblowing, but what great public interest is served by publishing e.g. the colors of the new IPhone before it's announced? Certainly less important interests than that served by knowing Bloomberg News is kowtowing to the Chinese government.
Considering they're also pushing BTC to no end -AND- they've been caught reading their customers' communication with no authorization you can draw your own conclusion about about bloomberg's integrity as a news organization.
There's was a certain point in my transformation from an optimist to a pessimist where I was just so angry. I was angry at news organizations for not having the balls to fight for their readers. I was angry at all the myths and lies I was fed, from meritocracy, to religion, to honor and loyalty. I was angry at businesspeople for rigging the game, and I was angry at politicians for helping them. I was angry at myself for believing and trusting in what I was told. I was just angry at everyone. And it was at this point that many youth would've become militarized, thinking that revolution was the answer. I did too. That is until I realized that revolutionaries are no different. They're just more of the same; people telling more lies to fuck over more people so that they can drive their precious fucking Mercedes past homeless shelters and slums. I'm still angry, but now when I read the latest bit of depressing news I just seem to laugh. The NSA spied on everyone? Good luck filtering that river of shit for useful intel guys. JPMorgan bribed the daughter of the Chinese prime minister? Haha investment bankers are such whores. Finance papers are too pussy to investigate totalitarian regimes? I think a new tagline is in order: All the news that's fit to print ... money.
I call this coping strategy the John Stewart method.
I think it's because nothing really surprises me anymore. I've just reached peak cynicism. So nowadays I just try to make light of the absurd brutality that is the world that we live in, because doing otherwise just seems pointless.
All the world is a farce.
/rant
PS: I'm not a conspiracy nut or anything like that. I'm just disappointed with the local incentive driven actions that some people take at the expense of society at large some of the time.
Peak cynicism? I like the phrase, but you aren't quite there yet.
The zenith of peak cynicism is when you wouldn't be surprised if the .01% (or powers that may be) decided one day to reduce the world population through NBC warfare just to maintain their power.
I feel you. Personally, If I want something to change, I know I'm going to have to do something about it myself. All else I can just try to prepare to do the future by taking baby steps and staying informed/in the loop. I try to keep my head down and work on my shit.
End users dont get their news from Wikileaks directly.
What Wikileaks does is breaking the ice by publishing something that everybody else wouldnt touch, and keeping it in the open.
Once Wikileaks took all the risk and blame, traditional risk averse media can jump on the bandwagon claming "It wasn't us" and serve the news to the end users.
If our media are too corrupt, then we need to create new ones that work better and change our habits. Submission to corruption can not be a mid- or long-term solution.
This is an extremely awkwardly constructed first sentence. Top Bloomberg editors were killing Chinese workers??:
"A reporter for Bloomberg News who worked on an unpublished article about China, which employees for the company said had been killed for political reasons by top Bloomberg editors, was suspended last week by managers. "
Wow, what lousy grammar for a Times article! It might be different if this were breaking news, but the article refers to an earlier story The New York Post.
You obviously haven't bothered to read the article then.
What really is the point of putting in the effort of commenting on something, when you cannot be arsed to put in the effort to comprehend it in the first place.
>> Out of the press box and onto the field - http://pressthink.org/2013/11/newco/
As Bill Bishop (one of the best 'China experts' on Twitter) recently said:
"Perhaps the new omidyar news venture can hire some of the excellent Bloomberg journalists in the projects and investigations team"
https://twitter.com/niubi/status/401645221022142464
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[1] http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303...
[2] https://twitter.com/niubi/status/401618179878686721
[3] https://twitter.com/niubi/status/401618756192858112