China overtakes US as world’s largest trading country
No surprise here. They have over a billion people and China has taken a course to industrialized their country and increase their middle class to around the size of the entire United States population. In contrast, we have taken the course to incentivize (through tax policy) the outsourcing of production to low wage/regulation countries and replace it with the farce called the “service economy”.
We will be this service economy, the problem is that nobody told the people that they will need to decrease their standard of living and be settled that most people will be working jobs that service the better to do in society. The most I take stock of what is happening, the more legitimacy people who say the social contract has been broken. I believe if we are not there, it will be clear quite soon. The economy does not work for the majority of people and definitely does not work for future generations.
When you see the continue rise of China, take a moment to read some American History from 1830-1906. I am not saying we can have the same types of opportunities, but the country seems more focused on providing them to people willing to take a risk and do some hard work.
RT – China has passed the US as the world’s biggest trading nation as measured by the sum of exports and imports in 2012. It’s a position the US has held for over six decades.
US exports and imports of goods last year amounted to $3.82 trillion, the US Commerce Department said last week. China’s trade in goods was $3.87 trillion, according to the country’s customs administration report in January.
While the US recorded a surplus in services of $195.3 billion last year and a goods deficit of more than $700 billion, according to Bureau Economic Analysis, China’s 2012 trade surplus, measured in goods, totalled $231.1 billion.
“The main reason for this growth is the Chinese government policy directed at stimulating domestic demand, which improves imports to growth,” Andrey Shenk, an economic expert at Investcafe, told RT. He said China increased its import volumes 5 fold in the last five years, and that allowed it become the biggest trading nation.
“For so many countries around the world, China is rapidly becoming the most important bilateral trade partner,” Jim O’Neill, chairman of Goldman Sachs’s asset management division and the economist who bound Brazil to Russia, India and China to form the BRIC investing strategy, told Bloomberg. And that can even “disrupt regional trading blocs,” for instance, “Germany may export twice as much to China by the end of the decade as it does to France,” O’Neill added.