Tobita Chow
@tobitac
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US-China, climate, politics, imperialism and world economy | Mostly on the other site | Chicagoland | immigrant | he/him
Joined January 2011
As I wrote back in 2015 (above), the current account is not a passive outcome of movements in the financial (then capital) account. As my recent piece shows, financial inflows into the US are almost double the size of US trade flows. The former do not automatically lead to the
1/2 Mona Ali is right about the surplus in the US financial account. In fact there is no difference at all between a country's current account deficit and its capital account surplus. One automatically implies the other, which is why a small but growing number of analysts have
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The Pentagon’s planned cobalt stockpile “could be used instead to produce 80.2 gigawatt hours of battery capacity — more than double the existing energy storage capacity in the US”. Our research manager Lorah Steichen wrote for the @FT. https://t.co/sLVFeKJDOf
ft.com
The US is funnelling materials such as cobalt and graphite into national defence rather than new climate technologies
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It often pays to read the actual article in full.
The decline in English-class book reading is very real. We did a deep dive, and found many teens assigned just 1 or 2 books per year. Instead, they're reading excerpts on a screen, like this one, 859 words of "Beloved."
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China’s expanding export control regime is aimed at several different goals: Geopolitical leverage: rare earths, critical minerals Protecting tech advantage: LFP cathodes, lithium processing Curbing export volumes: EVs, steel See also my earlier piece:
high-capacity.com
China is trying to build a "unified export control system" that's about much more than just leverage in the latest negotiations with the US
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Has anyone actually read the National Security Strategy beyond that one bullet-point list? Measures to exclude and contain China are all over the document. Subordinating China even provides most motivation for the bullet-point list! https://t.co/i1HukNzXxf
nytimes.com
For China, President Trump’s moves to loosen chip controls, soften U.S. rhetoric and stay silent on tensions with Japan amount to a rare string of strategic gains.
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This seems surprisingly good. Anyone know how it happened?
reuters.com
The European Union will offer development funding to countries affected by the bloc's carbon border tariff, the European Commission said on Thursday, as it attempts to soothe developing economies'...
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“VC firms based in China are raising U.S. dollar-denominated funds to deploy in AI investments, and U.S. endowments that shunned China for years are weighing a return, according to fund managers.”
wsj.com
Investors are plowing money into Chinese companies involved in AI despite growing competition between Washington and Beijing over the technology.
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Jay Powell/ Fed have quietly caved to Trump. US central bank independence is now a smokescreen. not because the Fed lowered interest rates yesterday, as Trump demanded. Less publicised, but more important, is the Fed decision to purchase USD 40bn of Treasury bills monthly.
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This sort of thing is hard to parody
@AaronRegunberg Do you think it would be good for Americans if China builds AGI before we do?
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So much of what we reflexively see as uniquely American problems and phenomena turn out to be, on further inspection, global trends.
A bit pessimistic from @_brianpotter: we know construction productivity growth has been awful in the US the past couple decades (cc @Austan_Goolsbee). However, there's not really any rich, large country that has seen strong growth in construction productivity (except Belgium?)
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What’s up with DeLauro?
The House just voted for a bloated $900B Pentagon budget despite the fact that the Pentagon can't even pass an audit, that Trump is getting ready for a war on Venezuela, and that so many people are about to lose health care. Here are the 115 Dem YES votes.
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Trump's "shithole country" rhetoric only makes explicit the racism that was always a key aspect of the existing global order and thus also US hegemony OTOH the shift from the hypocritical racism of liberal imperialism to shameless illiberal racism is a real shift
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We will overcome white guilt through multiracial and transnational working class solidarity and the struggle against racial capitalism and imperialism. You will be expropriated along the way but it will be worth it to end white guilt
No more White guilt
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I spent months talking to many, many people for this long @newrepublic post-mortem of the Inflation Reduction Act: What forces created the IRA, and how could it be gutted so unceremoniously? What might come next?
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Some thoughts on two key binaries structuring DC narratives on the supposedly contrasting goals and motivations of China and the US. They give us comic book villains and heroes instead of sober appraisal of the historical record and elite patterns of behavior in either country.
@RushDoshi I see two binaries at work here: 1) logic of power vs economics and 2) offensive vs defensive logic of security. It’s hard to sustain these binaries. First, as a purely empirical issue, Cold War economic policy was suffused with geopolitical motivations. These leaders were…
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@policytensor I think this is a misreading. Colby took a step back on the public rhetoric but the document makes clear that Biden policy in the Pacific continues, perhaps in more unilateral fashion. And the whole motivation here for imperialism in the Western Hemisphere is China exclusion.
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Wild chart from Jim Reid at Deutsche Bank, showing how much OpenAI is expected to burn before turning a profit. A couple things stand out also: How small the $AMZN burn really was for its first 8 years. How big the $UBER burn was before ultimately getting in the black
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The co-founder of Kalshi says: " The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion."
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Dem nativism helped make Trump possible in the first place @DanielDenvir
versobooks.com
It is often said that with the election of Donald Trump nativism was raised from the dead. After all, here was a president who organized his campaign around a rhetoric of unvarnished racism and...
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