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India is seen as critical for the US to develop alternatives to the existing supply chain where manufacturing is concentrated in only one country. US is positioning itself as a key supplier of defense needs of India through joint development and manufacturing in India. GE has a proposal to build jet engines in India, which Jake Sullivan, US National Security Advisor, calls just the kind of effort that will make it possible to rapidly build up the American relationship with India for advanced technologies and the supply chain in manufacturing. 

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45 cities in China which represent 40% of China's economic output are now in full or partial lockdowns in the second week of April 2022, according to one tally, says the WSJ.

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NYT looks at the strategic port network built by China over the last two decades including 100 ports or terminals in which China has invested or operates. This includes the ports of Rotterdam, Barcelona and Hamburg.

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P&G's experience in China shows that mothers are willing to spend more on diapers for their children. After aiming at the lower end for a frugal middle class diaper, the company is trying to catchup with more popular and better quality Japanese diapers at the higher end of the price range. With fewer children Chinese mothers are known to spend more on children in their family budgets.

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India's modernization efforts for ports terminals and logistics looking ahead to 2047- key to Vikshit Bharat Developed India. For the US and EU this is key to the goal of reducing concentration of manufacturing in China. This goal goes beyond the DJT administration tariffs on China of 48%. It is about common sense and reason not to get stuck with importing everything from one country in Asia, not Japan, not China, but spreading the production. The reason this gets concentrated is that one country gets an overwhelming advantage and only state or national policy of US or EU can change that which is what the DJT administration is doing. India is the only nation that has the potential to make this happen over the next 10 years to 2035.

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Deterioration in China- Japan relations after prime minister Sanae Takichi of Japan says Japan will intervene if China launches an invasion of Taiwan. China discourages Chinese tourists from visiting Japan. Japan tells Japanese in China to be cautious of surroundings when going out in China.

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 China exports to the US $438 billion vs $143 billion the US sends to China - the US deficit with China 2024 equals $295 billion. This is the fact that the media continues to ignore. Behind this is the gutting of the industrial base of the US shipped offshore to China since 2000 by American companies. 5 million jobs lost and tens of thousands of factories destroying the backbone of the economy, America's middle class.  Much of the US exports are oil and gas which can be shipped to Europe, India and other places. The soyabeans and grain from America's farmers is the other part of exports of $13 billion. The US can find other markets for the farm products including India under a trade agreement, and farmers can be supported with agricultural subsidies. It only makes sense to rebuild America's industrial base and pull back from an unfair trade arrangement that can only be the result of serious neglect of their responsibilities of previous administrations before DJT in 2016. The piecemeal efforts 2016-2024 have not worked to rebuild America's middle class,  recover jobs and factories, as a result a new bolder approach is needed in 2025 to rewrite the rules for world trade for an even playing field where everyone is treated with fairness. ...

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Political ads in the 2010 election campaign that point to the loss of jobs to China. A big shift in public opinion on the subject of US-China trade and jobs at home. This will increase pressure on the Obama administration for serious results in the negotiations for the appreciation of the yuan.

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The U.S. and China sign Phase 1 of the trade agreement in a sign of reduction of trade tensions between the two countries. Difficult issues of state subsidies under China's state enterprise model of development, and technological competition were put off for the future. China made the deal possible by agreeing to double its purchases of agricultural products, and offering to purchase about $200 billion in American goods and services over the next two years. This gives relief to farmers, a key part of Mr.Trump's support base. This also helps achieve a key Trump and U.S. goal of cutting the U.S. trade deficit with China quickly, just as happened decades ago with Japan.  See the related article and link on how for the first time in decades China's trade surplus with the U.S. is now set on a path for permanent decline. It dropped significantly in 2019 by 12.5% even though China's imports from the U.S. dropped by 21%, based on Chinese customs data released for 2019. With China increasing these imports significantly and the U.S. holding on to tariffs of 25% on $250 billon of China's exports to the U.S. which are outside the Phase 1 agreement, the downward course is set for the next few years for correction of a dangerous trade imbalance. That imbalance was allowed to develop over successive Republican and Democratic administrations. China already has the European Union as its first leading trading partner and south east Asia as its second. China plans to not be so closely intertwined with the U.S. in trade, and yet preserve its state sponsored development model and drive to compete in technology. China's increased purchases from the U.S. of $200 billon are broken down in terms of farm products- $32 billion, manufactured goods- $80 billion, energy products- $50 billion, services $35 billion. In effect the U.S. gets its goal of cutting the unsustainable China trade surplus quickly and with certainty in 3-5 years. China uses the period to transition for less trade linkage with the U.S. yet preserving its state sponsored model of development and drive for technological advancement.   ...

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The Shanghai Composite Index went up by 65% since July 1, 2014. On Jan 19, the Shanghai Index went down by 7.7% as Securities Regulatory Commission placed a 3 month bad on margin financing at brokerage firms Citic Securities, Haitong Securities and Guotai Junan Securities. All large state owned brokerage firms which were found to have violated securities rules on margin financing. Analysts say that the action by the regulator was to control risk on the stock market and give the the central bank, the People's Bank of China more room for monetary easing without negative side effects in the stock market, which had an extraordinary jump of 38% in the last 3 months. Margin financing has more than doubled in the last 6 months and accounted for 18% of average daily trading volume, according to an analyst at Credit Suisse.

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NYT offers a look inside the developments behind China's dominance in rare earth needed for industry.

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US and Iran accept Pakistan's mediation of the war with a 2 week ceasefire and opening of Straits of Hormuz- April 7 2026. The mediation by prime minister Sharif of Pakistan gave both sides in the war a way to back down. Both sides agreed to talks in Islamabad, Pakistan. As a partner of Pakistan, China may also have a role in setting up a settlement as China and Japan have the most to lose from the Straits of Hormuz being closed, oil prices rocketing up to $115 and higher, and even a prolonged shutdown of Hormuz Straits. Both China and Japan get 90% of their imports from Hormuz Straits. Oil prices drop to the $100 level from $115 after the announcement of talks in Islamabad. This is not a long term settlement. After the two weeks US president meets president Xi of China in Beijing shortly afterwards on May 14-15. It is likely that preparations for that trip will involve China and Pakistan working together to get the US and Iran to agree to an extension of the ceasefire. One outcome of this war is as Le Monde has noted- the unreliability of Hormuz supplies and shift to imports from US and Venezuela and other parts of the world for fossil fuels. And with this a renewed effort to reduce the fossil fuels needed by accelerating renewable energy supplies in Europe, India and China. More attention will also be focused on reducing the proliferation of nuclear weapons by all major powers. Removing US involvement in NATO may also turn out to be positive in some ways to bring Russia and US as nuclear powers to better working relationships, and reduce the nuclear arms race and weapons race. For Europe it means meeting needs of Ukraine and improving military capabilities. The overall result may be positive for all countries. The Middle East region will be seen as one in which no powers should get involved in and the Middle East will also find it has squandered its valuable oil dividend in five decades of wars and mismanagement and fall behind the rest of Asia and Europe, the US in economic progress and development. ...

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In extended diplomacy Carney visits Beijing, China and says middle powers are seeking ways to interact and trade in a world of big power rivalry. His visit is followed by visits by UK's Starmer and Germany's Merz, and preceded by Macron. At the same time Merz visits Ahmedabad for a kite festival and signs a new trade agreement with India, followed by Leyen and Costa of the EU who sign a EU-India trade agreement for 27 countries of the European Union. All this suggests carefully planned effort in Europe to create new channels of trade and reorient existing trade relationships that will be more resilient with the US shifting to focus on Monroe Doctrine idea of the Western hemisphere as its region of influence and security. This report shows pictures of Starmer and Xi meeting at the Plough Pub in UK in 2015 and reflects on how this has changed 11 years later with China now  a dominant power with the world's 3rd largest economy and a third of world's manufacturing and logistics. How does this change the relationship with China in 2026 for UK and Canada, and the EU? At the same time Germany-India and EU-India relationship creates a 2 billion people market with capital, technology and labor potential to create the largest potential driven economic group in the world, combining EU's 20 trillion to India's $4 trillion economy and mutually complementing, which has potential to rival the US at $30 trillion by 2030 as India grows rapidly in the new EU/Germany/India market and the EU gets a new boost with the complementarity of the two regions by 2035. This suggests that something new is happening and Germany after a lot of soul searching have hit on something we should see blossom by 2030 in the way China has grown since that picture with Cameron of Xi at the Plough Pub in UK. A problem China faces as it continues to push exports is that EU/ India and US will take in less exports and there is only so much it can put in Latin American and African market, UK/Canada market leading to industries with massive oversupply. Major economic redirection may result from the Merz/Leyen/Costa visit and firming up trade agreements with India if the EU, Germany and India have the determination to seize this opportunity in the 21st Century. As Leyen said it has the potential to create a stable world with values of the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and Mahajima Nikaya of the Buddha supporting the industrial states that emerged from the Industrial Revolutions. ...

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China is competing directly in advanced industrial goods such as semiconductors, EV's, machine tools and other products that German industry produces, shrinking the market for German products. By keeping its markets open after the US limited access to its markets for highly subsidized products made in china -with the goal of displacing American goods, jobs and factories under China's successive 5 year plans- Germany now faces the same direct threat the US faced and which took away America's production base. America's textbook based economists, and their followers in American business, who added loads of meaningless math to economics - adding lack of transparency for financial shenanigans- and took out the economic history, who lacked humility to see that other rivals could emerge from nowhere, bear a great deal of responsibility. Germany is now awakening to this experience of the United States and the threat it poses to its own industry.

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Chinese companies are heavily invesing in the stock markets and many companies get a large part of their earnings from the stock markets. The myth is that the real economy will simply go on like before if the stock market takes a nosedive. This is not true because large and small companies are both playing the stock market and IPO's in a big way. They are using corporate funds to invest in IPO's and stocks to boost their earnings. Morgan Stanley estimates that more than one third of corporate earnings in China come from putting money in stocks. The figures are much higher for some industries. In the health sector this number is 54% including real etate earnings also and in consumer goods sector 65% according to Morgan Stanley. If the markets take a steep downturn then these companies will have to show the losses on their income statements, depressing earnings and pushing their stock prices down even further and more steeply. Japan experienced something similiar in the the eighties. And in one respect the situation is more dismal than in Japan. The financial statements may be even less transparent than the ones in Japan's boom period. And investors lack the expertise to figure out whats behind the financial statements. There is no effort to think deeply about what can happen when a nosedive in stocks hits corporate earnings and these losses create a vicious cycle that sends stocks into a further fall turning into a freefall. A Professor of Accounting at a Business School in Shanghai, head of China research at Morgan Stanley and a governance expert in HongKong all point to the dangers in the situation as it evolves. Most of these bubbles like the housing bubble in the US have a situation which George Soros described recently as it burst after he had kept predicting for years that its going to collapse and finally he got tired of saying that because it continued going up. Its possibly the nature of bubbles that a sharp observer can tell whats going on but the phenomena will continue for quite awhile even when its obvious that something is wrong. Its something to do with human nature and the dynamics of human situations where knowing the danger the person will continue to act the opposite way just because everybody else is playing in a certain way. This is the situation in China in 2007. ...

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Priceline surged in a tech boom of two decades ago before coming down. It has regenerated itself through its 2005 acquisition of Amsterdam based portal Booking.com, followed by acquiring booking site Agoda and travel search engine Kayak. This has helped the stock rise in the last decade. Over 90% of its revenue comes from outside the U.S., even though its original model of naming a price for a booking is gone.  Booking.com is making an attempt to penetrate the Chinese travel market with a series of acquisitions starting with online travel agency Ctrip.com. Ctrip.com is established but recent acquisitions are burning cash. There is skepticism about these acquisitions as Chinese company share prices are seen as inflated similar to the stock booms that went bust in the U.S. Booking.com invested heavily in online advertising primarily through Google. Yet though western customers use search engines to find and book travel, in China customers go directly to Ctrip or apps like Meituan to book trips. To get people to book Chinese travel companies offer large discounts, a model that may not be right for Booking.com. The effort is to add to Ctrip customer base the middle to lower income customers from Didi ride sharing app and the Meituan app, through its partnerships with these companies. The experience of other travel sites such as Expedia in the Chinese market is poor, with price wars and Expedia selling its majority stake to Didi Chuxing. Expedia's CEO at the time calls it "the wild, wild east" because of the intense competition. About 130 million Chinese travelled overseas in 2017, up 7%, and spending $115 billion. ...