![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Sunny Day 15 and 55
Oct. 15th, 2010 07:03 pmI kind of ballsed up today, although it remained perfectly pleasant. I stayed indoors to make sure, if my flight was amongst those cancelled tomorrow, I would be first out of the traps to book the first available seat on Sunday.
It was mid-afternoon before I found (in an obscure news item) that the unions were calling for demonstrations tomorrow, but not for a strike. That is for next Tuesday. And so it looks as if the planes will be flying normally.
Which was all a bit of a bummer, because I would have at least liked to have made it to Villa Ephrussi on Cap Ferrat to see the gardens there. As it was, I exploited the best-weather day of the week (bar Tuesday when I went to Menton) sitting indoors reading a book and practising 10-tabling on a single screen.
So I went for a walk this evening and I made it into the Casino Ruhl, where the staff fulfilled the normal unhelpful qualities of casino staff everywhere. Poker is advertised as starting at 3pm every day, but this was 6pm on Friday night and there was one desultory dealer, and no players. Queries to the man who had demanded a "carte d'identité" fromme at the entrance met with a gallic shrug and a generalized wave of the arm in the direction of nothing in particular.
I'd wondered if there would be a €1-€2 game, but the mimimum stake, if and when it got started, was €5-€5. When oh when will casinos get their acts together and integrate properly with the online sites? A €5-€5 live game is neither here nor there in terms of my online bankroll, but when you only have €600 in your pocket and only the prospect of taking out another €400 on your debit cards, it's quite a lumpy game.
The answer to my rhetorical question is, probably one day, about 10 years after it was the obvious thing to do to everyone else in the universe. Casinos and their staff are just about the most conservative and resistant-to-change businesses I have ever met. The riposte "that's the way we've always done it" echoes through the marbled halls of casino heaven.
So I went for a short walk and wondered to myself, what to do? I wasn't hungry, and I didn't really fancy sitting in a bar or at a café table sipping a cup of coffee while life went on all around me. So I went for a slightly longer walk, and came back here. Maybe I will be hungry later on.
+++++++
I'm pleased that the BBC online is "leading" with the political summit in China, because in global macroeconomic terms it's easily the most significant thing that's happened this year.
Let's look at things from the point of view of the Chinese leadership. They face two fundamental problems -- the Internet, and what to do with all of the wealth they are accumulating and which at the moment they are mainly lending back to the US, because they are petrified of the political and social unrest that would be caused by too rapid a growth in the general standard of living in China.
The Internet is a real pisser for China because, despite their best efforts, even a farmer in the central Highlands these days has some idea that a Chinese dissident has won the Nobel Prize for Peace. If you think back to 1989, the student revolution was crushed because China could bus in soldiers from the remote countryside and tell them that there was a fascist counter-revolution underway. That could never happen now. In other words, if a Tianneman Square situation were to arise again, the conservative Chinese authorities no longer have the country-boys automatically in reserve.
So, some kind of social relaxation has to take place, some kind of freeing up the flow of information, without causing massive social upheaval.
Which brings us to Part Two. What to do with the surplus.
It would appear that the consensus among the Chinese leadership (although, as with all China-watching, you need to allow for a large margin of error and also for factionalism within the ruling system) is to "spread the wealth" to the countryside. The logic appears good. This will ease the rush of people to the coast for higher wages -- China's equivalent of our industrial revolution -- and will also see money going to people less likely to start political upheaval. The countryside is generally more conservative.
In this sense the Chinese leadership have spotted that revolution doesn't start from denying people greater wealth -- it stems from raising their wealth and at the same time raising their expectations. However, they should not underestimate the dissatisfaction that this might cause, not amongst the masses in the cities (most of them send money home, so if they need to send less, they are effectively better off even if their wages don't go up) but amongst the business elite and the professional classes. This is a classic example of building up resentment not because you are making people worse off, but because you are making other people relatively better off. Differentials.
But, as solutions go, it's probably China's best shot for the short term. The country can't go on buying US Treasuries forever, and the US doesn't want China buying up all the US real estate and/or businesses. So China has to do something with its surplus.
The pathetic American "currency war" line doesn't hold up, of course. I don't recall a strengthening Deutschmark harming the German economy in the 1970s. If the yuan appreciated it could well make things worse all round. Imports to China become cheaper, but the Chinese still don't buy them. Exports from China become pricier, but are still better value than anything the US can produce, so Americans continue to buy them. Devaluing a currency basically only works if demand is sufficiently elastic on both sides of the equation (or, at least, very elastic on one side). In this case, I suspect that demand levels in the US and China are rather inelastic.
In other matters financial, I'm going long the dollar again vs the yen, having picked up a few quid last time (thank you, Japanese Central Bank). here might be a test on the low side down to 78 yen, but the long-term value is definitely upwards over the next five or six years.
I'm also downbeat on the commodity currencies for the next 12 to 18 months. The A$ seems distinctly overbought to me.
_____________
It was mid-afternoon before I found (in an obscure news item) that the unions were calling for demonstrations tomorrow, but not for a strike. That is for next Tuesday. And so it looks as if the planes will be flying normally.
Which was all a bit of a bummer, because I would have at least liked to have made it to Villa Ephrussi on Cap Ferrat to see the gardens there. As it was, I exploited the best-weather day of the week (bar Tuesday when I went to Menton) sitting indoors reading a book and practising 10-tabling on a single screen.
So I went for a walk this evening and I made it into the Casino Ruhl, where the staff fulfilled the normal unhelpful qualities of casino staff everywhere. Poker is advertised as starting at 3pm every day, but this was 6pm on Friday night and there was one desultory dealer, and no players. Queries to the man who had demanded a "carte d'identité" fromme at the entrance met with a gallic shrug and a generalized wave of the arm in the direction of nothing in particular.
I'd wondered if there would be a €1-€2 game, but the mimimum stake, if and when it got started, was €5-€5. When oh when will casinos get their acts together and integrate properly with the online sites? A €5-€5 live game is neither here nor there in terms of my online bankroll, but when you only have €600 in your pocket and only the prospect of taking out another €400 on your debit cards, it's quite a lumpy game.
The answer to my rhetorical question is, probably one day, about 10 years after it was the obvious thing to do to everyone else in the universe. Casinos and their staff are just about the most conservative and resistant-to-change businesses I have ever met. The riposte "that's the way we've always done it" echoes through the marbled halls of casino heaven.
So I went for a short walk and wondered to myself, what to do? I wasn't hungry, and I didn't really fancy sitting in a bar or at a café table sipping a cup of coffee while life went on all around me. So I went for a slightly longer walk, and came back here. Maybe I will be hungry later on.
+++++++
I'm pleased that the BBC online is "leading" with the political summit in China, because in global macroeconomic terms it's easily the most significant thing that's happened this year.
Let's look at things from the point of view of the Chinese leadership. They face two fundamental problems -- the Internet, and what to do with all of the wealth they are accumulating and which at the moment they are mainly lending back to the US, because they are petrified of the political and social unrest that would be caused by too rapid a growth in the general standard of living in China.
The Internet is a real pisser for China because, despite their best efforts, even a farmer in the central Highlands these days has some idea that a Chinese dissident has won the Nobel Prize for Peace. If you think back to 1989, the student revolution was crushed because China could bus in soldiers from the remote countryside and tell them that there was a fascist counter-revolution underway. That could never happen now. In other words, if a Tianneman Square situation were to arise again, the conservative Chinese authorities no longer have the country-boys automatically in reserve.
So, some kind of social relaxation has to take place, some kind of freeing up the flow of information, without causing massive social upheaval.
Which brings us to Part Two. What to do with the surplus.
It would appear that the consensus among the Chinese leadership (although, as with all China-watching, you need to allow for a large margin of error and also for factionalism within the ruling system) is to "spread the wealth" to the countryside. The logic appears good. This will ease the rush of people to the coast for higher wages -- China's equivalent of our industrial revolution -- and will also see money going to people less likely to start political upheaval. The countryside is generally more conservative.
In this sense the Chinese leadership have spotted that revolution doesn't start from denying people greater wealth -- it stems from raising their wealth and at the same time raising their expectations. However, they should not underestimate the dissatisfaction that this might cause, not amongst the masses in the cities (most of them send money home, so if they need to send less, they are effectively better off even if their wages don't go up) but amongst the business elite and the professional classes. This is a classic example of building up resentment not because you are making people worse off, but because you are making other people relatively better off. Differentials.
But, as solutions go, it's probably China's best shot for the short term. The country can't go on buying US Treasuries forever, and the US doesn't want China buying up all the US real estate and/or businesses. So China has to do something with its surplus.
The pathetic American "currency war" line doesn't hold up, of course. I don't recall a strengthening Deutschmark harming the German economy in the 1970s. If the yuan appreciated it could well make things worse all round. Imports to China become cheaper, but the Chinese still don't buy them. Exports from China become pricier, but are still better value than anything the US can produce, so Americans continue to buy them. Devaluing a currency basically only works if demand is sufficiently elastic on both sides of the equation (or, at least, very elastic on one side). In this case, I suspect that demand levels in the US and China are rather inelastic.
In other matters financial, I'm going long the dollar again vs the yen, having picked up a few quid last time (thank you, Japanese Central Bank). here might be a test on the low side down to 78 yen, but the long-term value is definitely upwards over the next five or six years.
I'm also downbeat on the commodity currencies for the next 12 to 18 months. The A$ seems distinctly overbought to me.
_____________
