Automobile Sales and Birth Rates Decline

Worst Ever Car Sales Drop

China reported the worst-ever monthly sales drop in the world’s largest vehicle market on Wednesday, exacerbating concerns over the country’s economic slowdown and growing impact of an ongoing trade war with the United States. __ Auto Sales Decline

Elon Musk is betting Tesla on Chinese sales of the electric vehicles. He has not been reading the demographic tea leaves for the Middle Kingdom.



China recorded 15.23 million births last year, down 2 million from 2017 and the second consecutive annual decline, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) Marriage rates are also falling throughout China, with the ratio of newly-registered marriages in the total population down to 0.72 percent last year from 0.99 percent in 2013, NBS data showed. __ Lowest Since 1949

There are reasons why young Chinese do not want to get married or have children. Some of those reasons derive from having been raised as an “only child” among a sea of only children.

Despite attempts to encourage couples to have more children, China’s birth rate fell to its lowest since the country was founded in 1949. __More on historic decline

China’s workforce has already begun to shrink, leading to rising wage competition. China can no longer offer the low wage-costs that once attracted foreign manufacturers to China in flocks. These days, a growing number of competing nations offer more attractive economic packages — and without the intellectual property theft that China has become notorious for.

China is ageing at an unfortunate time in its history. The belligerent PRC government is creating problems on the international stage that an increasingly troubled economic base will find it difficult to help solve.

Those of us who view the United States’ total debt are alarmed and disgusted that it is now above 100% of our GDP. In China it’s approaching 300%. When this bubble bursts, no one knows what the consequences will be. We just know they won’t be pretty. __ In China Everything is the Government’s

There is no clear distinction between private sector and public sector in totalitarian China. Thus total Chinese debt is government debt, with all the repercussions that represents.

China is a Prison State

The US hosts over 40 million first generation immigrants. Even xenophobic Japan welcomes 10,000 immigrants per year. What about China?

According to the latest PRC census, there are 1,500 immigrants registered in the entire country. Not 1,500 per year – 1,500. Some of those may be the “illegal” wives that frustrated Chinese men married, mostly from Southeast Asia, and brought home. They are, the regime has dictated, “dilutive” to the nation. __ Keep Them In Chains

Chinese Expansionism Makes Enemies for Life

The new reality of the BRI and PRC “assistance” is increasingly seen as hegemony and blackmail by many. As a result Chinese firms have now been disinvited from previous areas where the PRC rulers thought they had deals sewn up – in Malaysia, Pakistan, The Maldives, Sri Lanka, Burma (Myanmar) and many African nations… The combination of intellectual, property and technology theft, forcing recipient nations of PRC largesse to use PRC managers and sometimes laborers as a condition of loans, forcing “partners” to divulge proprietary information, and grandiose statements like calling the BRI “a community of common destiny” as Xi recently did, create significant resentment and animosity among other nations and cultures. The PRC leaders may be able to fool starved-for-real-information Chinese at home with calling Russia’s Northern Route “the Arctic Silk Road, a partnership between China and Russia,” or claiming to be a “near-Polar state,” but others don’t fall for either the flowery phrases or the high-handedness. Further evidence of this dawning realization on the part of many erstwhile partner nations abounds. The PRC decided to blast the Pakistan-China Economic Corridor through lands disputed by Pakistan and India. They were on the Pakistan side of the always-contested Line of Control but still – for people who like to think of themselves as terribly clever and cunning, how tone deaf could this have been? Or when The Philippines took China to the World Court over its military buildup on Scarborough Shoal and both parties agreed to abide by the court’s ruling. When it came down in favor of The Philippines, the PRC simply sent additional warships to take the shoals by force. Tone deaf. __ The Bully China Sows Bad Seed

Most of China’s success over the past 30 years can be accounted for by corruption and greed in outside corporate officials and national governments. But as outsiders begin to understand the Chinese way of doing business — lying, cheating, stealing, and killing where necessary — erstwhile partners are having second thoughts, and beginning to desist.

It is the mark of a smart investor to understand when the tide is turning.