h/t James Delingpole – The New York Times reports that the developing world is abandoning green tainted US backed global banking institutions, and is looking to China for infrastructure finance.
According to the New York Times;
American diplomats are upset that dozens of countries — including Nepal, Cambodia and Bangladesh — have flocked to join China’s new infrastructure investment bank, a potential rival to the World Bank and other financial institutions backed by the United States.
The reason for the defiance is not hard to find: The West’s environmental priorities are blocking their access to energy.
Support for the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and its agenda free brand of capitalism, extends well beyond the developing world. All Asian and major non-Asian countries, except Japan and America, have agreed to join the new bank, with countries like Australia being offered a leading role in the new institution.
If this wasn’t so serious, it would be funny…
I nominate- ‘ironic’ as the catch-all term here..
China has successfully waged economic war on the rest of the world for a generation, flooding the market with cheap potato peelers and counterfeit drilling equipment….now they are going to deliver the coup de grace, facilitated by the bickering idiots in the District of Columbia.
Barak was apparently the name of mohamad’s horse. These countries are following the strong horse, not the weak horse.
Cornfusions say; “Beware of the tiger that can outrun our horse!”
As the west continues its stupid policies, China, Russia, and the extreme Islamic faction(Saudi Arabia and Iran [Yes they are enemies, opposite ends of the same story]) grow stronger.
At the moment however, Russia and Iran are united against Saudi Arabia. I’m surprised that that coalition hasn’t already blown up the two main Saudi pipelines and sunk tankers in the Strait of Hormuz (and the UAE’s pipeline around the Strait). Sanctions aren’t hurting Iran much because it can get its oil to market via the Caspian Sea, thence Russian pipelines. But low crude prices are impeding Putin’s plans.
Cathy R,
Wouldn’t actions like that cause the price of oil to skyrocket? It seems there might be an incentive there…
A bigger surprise to me was that terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda had not destroyed Saudi Arabia’s oil export facilities. And then I realized how successfully the House of Saud had bribed these groups and exported their problems to other countries. And now the same royal family is destroying America’s shale oil industry.
With allies like these, who needs enemies in Moscow or Tehran?
Remarkable to see such a rational article in the NYT .
Mike Bromely: The Chinese have slowly been expanding their sphere of influence for years. My ex-company worked in South East Asia, the Middle East and Africa for years. I recall flying from Nairobi to Bankgok in about 1995, sitting next to a very well educated Chinese lady heading back to China after a term in Tanganyika practicing her perfect English on me. At that time, the Chinese had over 2000 people working in Tanganyika. It seemed like where ever I traveled in those days, I would see Chinese making in roads and contacts: Iran, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Philippines, Ghana, Egypt …. I am sure they have people everywhere.
My company worked in Ethiopia for close to 30 years (Aprox. 1972-2002). Hardly ever saw Americans other than the Ambassador until the war between Eritrea and Ethiopia (1998-2000) and it looked like the Red Sea needed some military presence with the instability. Suddenly there were lots of US uniformed folks around in Addis Ababa. The US was quite late to the party – at least visibly, who knows about the tied aid
Post 2000, lots of folks joined the party (excerpt from friend Wiki pertaining to Ethiopia as an example..):
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“The post-2000 period (in Ethiopia), however, has seen a resumption of large disbursements of grants and loans from the United States, the European Union, individual European nations, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, the World Bank, and the African Development Bank. These funds totaled US$1.6 billion in 2001.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Note: Japan, African Development Bank and China. Japan was always in the area, they have a big footprint for a “small” nation of 127 million people. Always makes me feel tiny with our sparse population of 35 million in Canada.
China and India are sleeping giants.
They may yet fight each other again, however. If not on their mountainous frontier as in 1962, then in the Indian Ocean or South China Sea. China is effectively allied with Pakistan, while Vietnam, Indonesia, the PI and other SE Asian opponents of China’s expansion southwards seek alliance with India.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417070/environmentalists-civil-war-robert-bryce
“On one side are the pro-energy, pro-density humanists. They call themselves ecomodernists and are led by the Breakthrough Institute, a centrist, Oakland-based environmental group. On Wednesday, it released what it describes as an “ecomodernist manifesto,” a document that, at root, states the obvious: Economic development is essential for environmental protection.”
“Economic development is essential for environmental protection.”
the IPCC said this since many years. spcifically Edenhofer.
Did you read this in Bloomberg? The same outfit that says that March 2015 was the hottest month evahhhh! and the first three months of 2015 was the hottest first quarter evahhhhhh!
Ottmar Edenhofer:
“…one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”
There you have it. The “climate” scare is not about science at all. It is 100% politics.
If you look at US hydrocarbon production growth since 2008, Obama clearly isn’t against fossil fuels, just against fossil-fuel prosperity for anyone who’s not in a blue State.
This is just another impact of maniacal over reach by this WH onto international institutions. Leave it to the Chinese to steer around the obstinate policy obstacle with a new international lending institution. At least someone stands up to warped policy.
The Chinese have their own money loser operations in state-owned industry. They don’t need to compound the problem with Obama’s uneconomic World Bank projects in renewable projects to no where. Some places in the world still think about growth and development in place of largess and perception plays.
My prediction from the beginning of the Obama presidency is playing out. It was that the Chinese and Putin would be falling over themselves outmaneuvering Obama in the global power chess game. They will probably accelerate their own version of over reach efforts up to the last days of his term and might then be overstretched on expansion if based on Hillary.
India isn’t playing ball either.
http://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/india-to-overtake-china-as-biggest-thermal-coal-importer/
“India is set to overtake China as the biggest importer of power-station coal, emerging as the leader of a clutch of regional nations that miners including Glencore Plc and BHP Billiton Ltd can tap for new orders.”
And India have just defenestrated Greenpeace (good for India!)
ah, now there’s a dog which might hunt Obama into ‘climate initiative’ irrelevance. The thing is the Chinese also have a clean air agenda to push on with against a gigantic energy sector so a conjured sense of crisis might help Beijing too in implementing that.
The name of the Chinese president is Xi Jinping.
Another thing worth noting is that these countries probably didn’t really want to turn to China for help. People are aware enough not to trust the Chinese. But since they’re being left in the lurch by the narcissistic West, their actions aren’t surprising.
A programme i saw about Chinese in Africa seemed to show the Africans were more than happy to have them investing. The Chinese have less strings attached and don’t treat them as idiots.
Just a matter of time until the dollar is replaced as the world’s reserve currency, too.
Modern environmentalism, at its core, is just hatred of man, hatred of the modern world created by him, hatred of his mind, the faculty that created the modern world, and hatred of the country that provided the freedom that allowed its creation. It has become a pseudo-scientific religion that has state backing.
This is correct about CAGW environmentalism. It shares these attributes with militant Islam. Islam is a backward dark ages culture which has failed to develop culturally and scientifically, and looks at modern industrial societies with inferiority-based angst, envy and bitterness. Worse (for them) it sees this technological civilisation as having roots in Christianity. This fuels the hate still further.
It won’t be long before AGW-environmentalists realise how much in common they have with militant Islam, and make common cause with the Imams of hate. Can you imagine Mike Mann with a muslim beard? – might not have to for long.
I don’t buy it. More than likely it is because we have been running the money printing presses hot and overtime at least since 2012.
The West environmental priorities have been blocking access to a lot things other than energy to poor nations and way before President Obama. See how many children under 5 were killed by malaria because of the policies of the USA, WHO, World Bank, etc. All well documented by an article written in 2004 in the New York Times. Letting kids die in a way that can only be described as torture.
Then you can guess who came to the rescue: CHINA.
Here is a link to the article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/11DDT.html?pagewanted=3
@Roy:
Part of it too is that clearence of $ US payments go through US banks with US monitoring (or is that spying?) and regulation (or is that political strong arming) and assett forfieture / siezure risks. The overreach and abuse of financial systems is painfull to the ‘customer’ so they are happy to side step that crap.
We have Prohibition to thank for that. A policy largely supported by Republicans. Democrats are not the only culprits when it comes to our problems.
Good article about the World Bank entitled “worldbank projects leave trail of misery around globe.” All of these so called World/United Nations agencies have the same agenda…..world governance under the green flag. People and nations are starting to realize it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/17/worldbank-projects-leave-trail-misery-around-globe-kenya_n_7055722.html
Although I’m certainly no fan of the World Bank, it remains a comparatively small effort for the US. Although US contributions have gone up under Obama, they are below $2.5 billion for 2015.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS20792.pdf
Compare that to the $20 billion for USAID programs or the more than $3 billion in military aid to Israel.
No matter how much environmental lipstick you put on the argument “We don’t want you to use cheap energy to build larger economies just because we did”, it ain’t going to go over well.
Absolutely stunning.
Regards
Climatic Heretic
I think that the Chinese are more unwilling to impose the kinds of environmental conditions that the Obama administration wants to put upon international development lending. Nevertheless, we won’t know what OTHER kinds of conditions they put upon other international firms in a political or trade context. This makes this bank somewhat problematic to me; the Japanese don’t want to join because of a lack of transparency on the part of this new bank, or so they say. This is just another stage, though, in China’s efforts to achieve some kind of economic (consequently, political) dominance in Asia if not the rest of the world. What this dominance will look like remains unknown; but it does not look good for us in any event unless we get realistic about the direction of the world economy and about how our own environmental policies hurt our own economic efforts.
Some of you might enjoy this fascinating three page article about China, silver and the Opium Wars, and current China / US relations.
SILVER AND OPIUM
http://www.professorfekete.com/articles/AEFPositionPaper5SilverAndOpium.pdf
Max,
I read your link. It all makes sense. But I’ve been reading the Austrian economists for forty years, and all along they’ve been predicting the imminent demise of the dollar.
When is it gonna happen for real?
Looks like Austrian economics is the same as CAGW.
..
Their predictions never come true
dbstealey,
Fekete’s view is very different from the Austrians’ view. For example, Austrians are believers in the Quantity Theory of Money, which Fekete makes short work of as a non-applicable linear model of a highly nonlinear world.
To your question though, bear in mind that there is not a single example of an irredeemable currency that has survived more than a few decades.
The good news is that each person is able to make his or her own bet as to whether the USDollar will be the exception.
When gold goes into permanent backwardation, that is, when we wake up one morning and there are lots of bids for gold in dollars, but no asks, then all dollar denominated assets won’t fetch a gram of gold. The gold basis (nearest future price – cash price) has been shrinking steadily since the US defaulted in 1971. Gold has been flirting with backwardation, going in and out of it for several years now. For those who choose to see, that hardly inspires confidence in the longevity of the dollar.
But again, we all get to make our bets 🙂
@dbstealey:
It is already 90% done. When on the gold standard, a stamp was 5 cents, gasoline was 25 cents, bread was a dime to 15 cents a loaf and our house was bought for $7500. Now a stamp is one penny shy of 50 cents, gas is $2.50 if Florida (3.50 in California), bread is $1 to $2 a loaf and that house sold for over $80, 000. The dollar is already 90% gone.
EM Smith
Isn’t this dollar decline logarithmic? Like (hypothetical) greenhouse warming? So it’s hard to talk of percentages.
What an interesting development.
Obama’s pressure on the World Bank to refuse loans to 3rd world countries for the purposes of building coal fired power plants has now backfired in a most interesting way.
Is there a single foreign policy initiative that has turned out as intended for this guy? He is a modern day Demosthenes. Dominant orator. Results suck.
“Dominant orator.”
I don’t agree. Our Dear Leader can deliver a decent speech, when he and his teleprompter are well rehearsed. ‘Off the cuff’ efforts are, at best, delivered in halting, rambling monologues that are difficult to listen to.
Ditto!!! He is only a dominant orator to the tone deaf.
This was to be expected. In 1976, I attended a conference where the keynote speaker was the Tanzanian Ambassador to the US. He stated word to the effect, “We do not need your isms whether from the West or the East, but we do need your help.”
The Chinese have learned that lesson which is why they are doing well in Africa and elsewhere and why their infrastructure bank will be a success.
I once was a geological consultant to an entity called Angola LNG. I inquired how the project got started. Turns out Angola went to the IMF for development funds at the end of their civil war. IMF staff flew to Angola and were shocked at the amount of natural gas being flared into the atmosphere from offshore oil platforms. After scolding the Angolans for their “poor world citizenship,” they told the Angolan’s they would give them aid only if they started an LNG project to capture and sell the excess gas. The IMF also said that in addition to the Angolan aid request, they would help fund the LNG project.
As long as the IMF and World Bank want to impose their agendas, countries will seek alternatives and now China can give it to them.
Yes. China is in. Will continue to do so, even with typical air pollution problems and ups and downs financials associated with growth. The West had the same problems. Nothing new.
The West is telling China to stop air pollution and coal burning and CO2 pollution. China is not to blame.
China is doing this because we (The WEST) want our iPhone, iPad, iPod, iEverything Else as cheap as possible.
So we sell coal to China for iEnergy. Plenty of it. So they can produce as much as iJunk as we want.
Now China decided, you know what. You have your iWorld Bank, we can have our iChina Bank. And, well since we have learned how to export iJunk to you, and you like it, we will now export iChina Bank and you will like it. iChina Bank will be much cheaper than the World Bank. At least for awhile.
Dr. Klein:
It’s hard to see how getting someone else to fund (and thereby assume the risk of) a project to monetize an otherwise completely wasted resource was a bad thing for Angola. Sounds a lot like what China plans to do.