Off The Cuff: Big Trouble In China Trade Talks

In this week’s Off The Cuff podcast, Chris and Charles Hugh Smith discuss:

• What’s driving the latest breakdown in trade talks
• The 2 Chinas: and why it can no longer have it both ways
• The dollar shortage in China
• The great global slowdown

The big news driving the markets this week is obviously the breakdown in trade talks between the US and China. In this week’s podcast, Chris and Charles deconstruct the key variables of the situation and explain why they don’t think a deal can get done anytime soon:

China has two dual natures. One is this state run an organized economy. And then there’s these little patches of it. The export economy that’s quasi-capitalized in the sort of classical sense, right? Competition and so on.

Then there’s other – there’s another two China’s. One is the rural West, which is the rural center of the country, which is poor. And there’s between 600-800 million people living in relative poverty in rural China. Then there’s the Western Seaboard, right? I mean the Eastern Seaboard, along the Pacific where there’s between 400-500 million people who are living in a very developed country. But it’s called China in both cases. But one China is still developing and the other China is fully developed and building a super power military and so on.

So, not to belabor the point, but you know developing countries get breaks.