Another Obama First … China’s Economic Output Officially Pushes US To #2 For The First Time In 150 Years

It’s Official: America Is Now No. 2

 

 

 

 

” Hang on to your hats, America.

  And throw away that big, fat styrofoam finger while you’re about it.

  There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just say it: We’re no longer No. 1. Today, we’re No. 2. Yes, it’s official. The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to become the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, America is not the leading economic power on the planet.

  It just happened — and almost nobody noticed.

  The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A. “

 

 

You voted for “fundamental change” and the man has delivered …

 

 

” As recently as 2000, we produced nearly three times as much as the Chinese.

  To put the numbers slightly differently, China now accounts for 16.5% of the global economy when measured in real purchasing-power terms, compared with 16.3% for the U.S.

  This latest economic earthquake follows the development last year when China surpassed the U.S. for the first time in terms of global trade.”

 

 

 

    These two paragraphs should send chills down any forward-looking American’s spines , especially amongst the young …

 

 

 

” Make no mistake: This is a geopolitical earthquake with a high reading on the Richter scale. Throughout history, political and military power have always depended on economic power. Britain was the workshop of the world before she ruled the waves. And it was Britain’s relative economic decline that preceded the collapse of her power. And it was a similar story with previous hegemonic powers such as France and Spain.

  This will not change anything tomorrow or next week, but it will change almost everything in the longer term. We have lived in a world dominated by the U.S. since at least 1945 and, in many ways, since the late 19th century. And we have lived for 200 years — since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 — in a world dominated by two reasonably democratic, constitutional countries in Great Britain and the U.S.A. For all their flaws, the two countries have been in the vanguard worldwide in terms of civil liberties, democratic processes and constitutional rights.”

 

 

 

Market Watch has more on the latest (dubious) accomplishment of Barack Obama’s administration 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Bergdahl Deal Smells Bad And Getting Worse

Anger Explodes Over Treatment Of Bergdahl’s Release As Veterans, Troops Call Him A Deserter

” For all the yellow ribbons strewn across his hometown in Idaho and the gratitude expressed by his parents in an emotional visit to the White House on Saturday, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl will receive a hero’s welcome when he returns to the United States after nearly five years in Taliban captivity.

  From military forums across the country, a groundswell of anger is rising over the Obama administration’s silence on perhaps the most controversial question surrounding the deal that freed Bergdahl in exchange for five senior Taliban members: Was he a deserter?

  So far, the U.S. government has shied away from the long-nagging question, which raged anew Monday with growing clamor on the Internet about the circumstances of Bergdahl’s disappearance from his unit’s small forward position in Afghanistan on June 30, 2009.

  Military-related blogs, Twitter accounts and Facebook pages were filled with screeds from commenters accusing Bergdahl of being a “traitor” or a Taliban “collaborator.” The online publication The Daily Beast published a nearly 2,000-word first-person account by a former Army infantry officer who said he was privy to details of Bergdahl’s disappearance and who stated flatly that “he was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.”

  The mother of one of six soldiers who’ve been identified as being killed in circumstances related to the search for Bergdahl was furious over the opaque handling of the case, telling Army Times that the Pentagon “really owes the parents of these fallen soldiers the truth.”

  But instead of addressing the desertion issue head-on, complained many military analysts and war veterans, the Obama administration is allowing the debate to fester, only deepening the skepticism of current and former service members who demand to know how Bergdahl left his unit, how many U.S. forces were killed in the search effort, and whether there are plans to conduct a legal review of his case and, if necessary, prosecute him.

  Michael Waltz, who as an Army major commanded U.S. Special Forces in eastern Afghanistan at the time Bergdahl disappeared, said the sergeant deserted and shouldn’t have been accorded POW status.

“ He just walked off after guard duty and wandered into the nearby village,” Waltz told McClatchy in an interview Monday. “This guy needs to be held accountable when the time is right, of course. Every American deserves to come home. I’m happy for his family. But he needs to be held accountable.”  “

 

Read more

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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China – Australia Say Goodbye To Dollar

China and Australia Agree To Stop Using U.S Dollar

 

 

 

” Over the weekend, Australia appears to have come to the same conclusion, with the Australian reporting that the land down under is set to say goodbye to the world’s “reserve currency” in its trade dealings with the world’s biggest marginal economic power, China, and will enable the direct convertibility of the Australian dollar into Chinese yuan, without US Dollar intermediation, in the process “slashing costs for thousands of business” and also confirming speculation that China is fully intent on, little by little, chipping away at the dollar’s reserve currency status until one day it no longer is.”

 

 

Related articles

• China-Australia Pact Could Lead to Dollar’s Collapse (joemiller.us)
• CHINA-AUSTRALIA to DITCH US DOLLAR (secretsofthefed.com)
• Thanks, World Reserve Currency, But No Thanks: Australia And China To Enable Direct Currency Convertibility (sgtreport.com)
• Another Country Jumps Ship On U.S. Dollar For Chinese Bilateral Trade (personalliberty.com)
• China And Australia Say Goodbye To World Reserve Currency In Trade Deal (aworldchaos.wordpress.com)

 

 

 

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We All Better Learn Chinese Thanks To Comrade Mao Mau

China Eclipses U.S. as Biggest Trading Nation

 

 

” China surpassed the U.S. to become the world’s biggest trading nation last year as measured by the sum of exports and imports of goods, official figures from both countries show.

U.S. exports and imports of goods last year totaled $3.82 trillion, the U.S. Commerce Department said last week. China’s customs administration reported last month that the country’s trade in goods in 2012 amounted to $3.87 trillion.

China’s growing influence in global commerce threatens to disrupt regional trading blocs as it becomes the most important commercial partner for some countries. Germany may export twice as much to China by the end of the decade as it does to France, estimated Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s Jim O’Neill.

“It is remarkable that an economy that is only a fraction of the size of the U.S. economy has a larger trading volume,”Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said in an e-mail. The increase isn’t all the result of an undervalued yuan fueling an export boom, as Chinese imports have grown more rapidly than exports since 2007, he said.”

 

Related articles

• China Eclipses U.S. as Biggest Trading Nation (grumpyelder.com)
• China trade now bigger than US (independent.ie)
• In World Trade, China Edges Out The U.S. (forbes.com)
• China Passes U.S. to Become World’s Biggest Trading Nation (madeinusanews.com)
• China trade now bigger than US (sgtreport.com)
• China overtakes US in world trade (guardian.co.uk)

A Bug Or A Feature ?

CHINA OVERTAKING US AS GLOBAL TRADER

 

 

 

 

 

 ” Shin Cheol-soo no longer sees his future in the United States.

The South Korean businessman supplied components to American automakers for a decade. But this year, he uprooted his family from Detroit and moved home to focus on selling to the new economic superpower: China.

In just five years, China has surpassed the United States as a trading partner for much of the world, including U.S. allies such as South Korea and Australia, according to an Associated Press analysis of trade data. As recently as 2006, the U.S. was the larger trading partner for 127 countries, versus just 70 for China. By last year the two had clearly traded places: 124 countries for China, 76 for the U.S.

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EDITOR’S NOTE _ This is the first installment in “China’s Reach,” a project that will analyze China’s influence with its trading partners over three decades, and explore how that is changing business, politics and daily life. ”

 

 

Related articles

• AP IMPACT: China overtaking US as global trader (sfgate.com)
• China overtaking US as global trader (conservativeread.com)

More “smart diplomacy” … The Alienation of Our Allies Continues

  China benefits from Obama’s energy policies .

” More recently, however, Mr. Harper has dropped that rhetoric and hailed China as a new market for Canadian energy, particularly oil from the oil sands of Alberta. Nearly all of Canada’s oil exports
now go to the United States.

  Opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, which would take oil sands production to the American Gulf Coast, appears to be a factor in Mr. Harper’s recent attempts to
solicit China as both a customer of and investor in Canada’s energy sector. “