BioRichard D. Wolff is an Economist, Author, and Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and New School University. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne). He has authored or co-authored 10 books including The Economics of Colonialism, Bringing It All Back Home: Class, Gender and Power in the Modern Household, and Rethinking Marxism. His recent work has concentrated on analyzing the causes and alternative solutions to the current global economic crisis.
Comments from Registered Members | (Register or log in to make your comment.) | Bully 2009-08-23
A not very credible interview. The questioner appears to have been spoonfed. Mr Wolff should avail himself of a copy of the Olympic Games opening ceremony and play it over and over and over - until he's convinced of the discipline,determination and resourcefulness of the Chinese people and their government. Their philosophy on social distribution of wealth is so far removed from the western model as to be almost totally opposite. Whilst greed and corruption there will be, it will be on a minor scale and of minimum influence - whereas in western capitalist society our failure to put wraps on general corporate greed and the complicity of governments will ultimately sound our economic death knell. | sunrise 2009-08-06
http://www.archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares You can order from Netflix; | sunrise 2009-08-06
The Anti-Empire Report
August 4th, 2009
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org;
Keeping track of the empire's crimes | Genesis 2009-08-04
Actually people did comment on China's complete economic collapes, which is the collapes I am talking about. Someone commented that China was going to starve to death by 2010.
I am reading the report you mention, and have read similar documents before. I am in the midst of writing a counter argument to common western attempts to undermine the Chinese model. They do this as a way to make sure the US model remains dominant and therefore so the US and western countries maintain control and influence. However, time will prove this to be a losing arugment.
What a lot of people lose track of is that it is very unclear how much value added production goes on in the purely export sector of the Chinese economy. In the export sectors of China that we are familier with in the west, there is not much value added to the final product. Also, many high tec exports are in the same situation. Thus, on paper you have a high level of exports, and what seems to be a export dependency, while in the re | sunrise 2009-08-03
No government can get away with this kind of salvage assaults for last 300 years unless majority of their citizen condones their barbaric act. Richard D. Wolff seems lacking the depth of understanding but buy into the west China Bash 24/7 of inferior complex and jealous of any and all other countries’ success when those countries are targeted countries by the West. | sunrise 2009-08-03
years on the name of Christian and the church are the largest land owners in the their world countries. As a violent barbarian act going stronger by days as of 2001’s false 911 to rob the oil in the middle-east and bombed Iraq and murdered millions of innocent children and elderly and slaughtered 3000 American citizens. Next prepare to rob Iran use US/CIA/M16 home made green party. Unless the west learns what true meaning of civilization is about the violent act will continue. Empire = barbarian, murderer, robber, theft, and criminals.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5948263607579389947
Killing hopes by William Blum and Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq by Stephen Kinzer, economic hitman john Perkins.
Did Chinese committed any of above barbarian acts? Tienment square accident was engineered and instigated by the west, any thing new under the sun? No government can get away with this kind of salvage assaults for last 300 years unless major | sunrise 2009-08-03
see the web - a real barbaric act to murder our own citizen to invent a war to committing genocide, slaughter, rob, steal for last 300 hundred years started with free labor by slavery blacks and placed them in the second class citizen and locked up their youth for population control preventing the boys from give birth to next generation in 21st century. Slaughtered Eskimo for their elephant seal and their land and left Eskimos in disarray and deprived their education opportunities sell them the Christian believes. Next to Hawaii’s sugar cane to de-throne the queen and took their land and resources and changed and extirpated their very essence of real culture and civilization that west do not have clue of the meaning of the words. And forced Hawaiian to change to Christian from their native believes. Sell the Christian to the central and South Americans and depleted every single natural resources they have and left their citizen below poverty line for last 75 years on the name of Chris | kmbence83 2009-08-03
This study of Martin Hart-Landsberg is full of statistics (taken from World Bank, IMG and Chinese official sources): The Chinese Reform Experience, A Critical Assessment http://www.lclark.edu/%7Emarty/China--RRPE%20forthcoming.pdf
Check it out. There's no denying the growing export dependence of china, and potential sources of instabilty getting stronger. NOONE said that China's going to "collapse" (what would that mean, anyway?)...but increased economic turmoil and disruptions, potentially coupled w/ social upheavals is NOT EXCLUDED. they are not inevitable, but still quite likely. We'll see what happens. | Genesis 2009-08-03
China is doing more to tackle climate change than even the wealthy industrialized countries, who pollute far more than Chinese people, actually 8 times more per person, even though we have better infrastructure and more energy efficiency. From developing and promoting electric cars, to tearing down thousands of smaller and outdated coal power generators to their focus on developing clean energy, in many ways China is leading the way over the past several years.
You really think China is going to be starving to death in 1 years time? Get real! Have you ever even been to China? There is hardly an arable piece of land that people are not growing food on, even in the cities. Rather than the picture you present, China actually exports a lot of food to surrounding nations and even to the west! Westerners have really been fed a lot of crap when it comes to China, you have no idea whats going on there or what things are like. | Genesis 2009-08-03
Go to the world bank and look up China, that is the sources! Where are your sources or Wolff's sources? He never mentions any statistics at all. | Genesis 2009-08-03
People like you have been saying since Mao's red army came to power that China would never be able to maintain its growth, it was doomed and so on. Yet it has been able to achieve 9% growth for almost 60 years.
China will not lie when it comes to economics, and the reason is because they have had extremely bad experiences with false statistics during the great leap forward and other times during Mao's rule. They are well aware of the dangers and would avoid them at all costs.
Wolff will not be proven right at all, and if anything he is already being proven wrong. While it is true that state banks are lending a lot of money, they are lending money primarily only to state industies, which are much more reliable and also much more focused on domestic economy then export.
China does not import 1/3 of its food. The US also imports most of its resources including oil. | dforce1969 2009-08-03
China's growth is unsustainable;They are doomed to collapse within 10 years;At 8% annual growth a society & its energy & food needs DOUBLE within 15 years;Already china imports a third of its food and two thirds of its oil; b global Oil production has peaked and is declining at 7% per year(Figures from the I E A),world wheat productin is declining,due to climate change /soil destruction/ global fresh water aquifers & mountain melt waters also decreasing;The Capitalist dictatorship in this "communist" nation (where 70% of wealth is owned by 1% of population) has created a massively polluting,oppressive behemoth lumbering towards its fossil fuelled extinction;By the late 2010's expect mass starvation and another revolution. | Bunny 2009-08-03
There is plenty of sympathy for Empire here. Why should we believe them? Censorship is the norm for them. Why should we believe you? There is absolutely NO citation to evaluate your sources (if there is any). | kmbence83 2009-08-03
Professor Wolff could easily be proven tight in the near future.
The other thing that should be said is that not only China's current growth rates are probably debt-induced, and unsustainable, but also there have been many indications in the last years that the Chines Government is manipulating the statistics.
The best critically-minded experts on China's economy are Martin Hardt-Landsberg and Paul _Burkett. It would be great if REALNEWS could do an interview with them.
They are also of the opinion that China's economy has become very unstable in the last 2 decades or so...
We surely live in interesting times. | goodguy62003 2009-08-03
re Kaijiansen - The Chinese are no more barbaric that people behind the new world order. See whats happening in the middle east for the last 30 years - now in Afghanistan - Pakistan - Iran. who do you think is the backing the tibetiants and activitists in the province in xinjiang ? What about South America and Africa.? As for smokes and mirrors, the fatherland of smokes and mirrors is USA - this financial turmoil have brought this to the forefront to almost everyone in the world. In my opinion At least the Chinese is just trying to feed its 2 billion people and have not resort to financial and political Tyrannism for power and money for a select group.
goodguy | markmason 2009-08-03
Why is the mainstream media continually running stories suggesting the economic collapse is over? Today, AP released a story suggesting that the housing prices have stabilized and is now rebounding in some areas. Other articles have suggested that other indicators are also suggesting that the US economy will rebound early next year. The public is getting one message from mainstream media and another of a very different nature from alternative sources such as TRNN. | Zhu, Bajie 2009-08-02
The other key point that the professor totally missed is China's plan (currently being actively executed) to internationalize the RMB. By 2012, say analysts in Shanghai, as much as $2 trillion (£1.69 trillion) worth of trade flows may be settled using the “redback” - most of that would be with the commodity-producing world and the emerging economies of Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The natural resource accumulation is to support that projected growth. China can well afford to issue the RMB as easy credit (since it is a fiat currency as much as the greenback) for other nations to buy China made goods with. If anything, China's manufacturing growth is NOT FAST ENOUGH. | Zhu, Bajie 2009-08-02
The Professor clearly knows VERY LITTLE about anything Chinese. Beijing not only has the ability to produce domestic consumption, it is also doing it. The "Home Appliances to Village" program already sold $20 Billion in refrigerators and washers and TVs in the last 3 months, via coupon based deep discounts. Imagine doing the same (consumption vouchers) with consumer goods (quite a few 2nd line cities have done so already) on a national scale - it can mean another $50 Billion increase a year. China's retail sales is already growing at the mid teens.
And no, China is not going give away "horded" production any time soon. There are many markets outside of the developed world that hunger for the high quality and affordable Chinese goods. It just means shifting sales there.
| Saturn_ls1 2009-08-02
The biggest worry for developed economies is China’s ability to lay waste to local manufacturing. AS said, China has cheap labour, can re-tool fast, little in the way of social laws (e.g. health, pollution,..) and a sufficiently intelligent work force. Competing against China’s manufacturing might is frightening, Add to that a government that recognizes their large financial reserves are at risk and now committed to invest them or lose them,
If China can and does threaten global manufacturing, there could be a serious threat to global trade resulting in trade wars – both political and physical. I wouldn’t call it a bubble but rather the mechanism that will, unfortunately, decide the redistribution of wealth for this century. | Saturn_ls1 2009-08-02
How can 1.4 billion people be seen as simply as Wolff states. I agree with others – China is very complicated. Any BTW, is China over stating their economy any more than any other country? I think not.
Wolff seems to place over emphasis on China’s exports. Yes hey are am important contributor but China sells to lots of countries and they are quite ready to shift from one market to another as conditions shift. No Mr. Wolff, the whole world will not collapse simultaneously but rather in round robin fashion. The question is not whether China’s markets will but out in front but rather survive the best...
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PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay. And joining us again from New York is Richard Wolff. He teaches political economy at the New School. Thanks for joining us again, Richard. RICHARD WOLFF, ECONOMIST, THE NEW SCHOOL: Thank you.JAY: So China says its economy has already bottomed out, and it's somewhat echoing American messaging that the recovery has begun, except China's making bigger claims. They say their stock market's roaring back, the economy and growth is picking up, and they've more or less avoided the worst of the crisis. What do you make of this? Is China going to pull the world out of recession?WOLFF: Well, one of two things is going on. Either the Chinese economy genuinely is entitled to be called a miracle, or something is happening in China that is frightening, which is a disconnection from reality, an explosion of mythology, of numbers that are deeply, one would have to say, dubious. Let me explain. Everywhere in the world, everyone has been saying for 25 years that the genius of the Chinese economy was based on exports, that China could and did produce better quality or lower price or both, and flood the world with the exports that their economy made possible. That was what everybody said, including the Chinese. We now have a situation in the world where we have a global capitalist crisis. Everywhere, consumption is down. Everywhere, people are buying fewer goods, including goods from China. How is it possible that in that society, so dependent on the world economy, they could now have an explosive growth? Their stock market is now 100 percent higher than at its low—nothing remotely like that hardly anywhere in the world, certainly not in the United States or Europe. How is that possible? In order to believe what the Chinese are saying, you would have to agree that in a matter of months, mostly a year, no more, they have been able to transform their economy from an export-based powerhouse to a domestically focused industrial engine. Nowhere in the world has that ever taken less than decades.JAY: And they would have had to have accomplished that at a time of growing unemployment, because losses in the American and European markets.WOLFF: Absolutely. And growing unemployment, because a factory that's geared to making cheap toys for the United States cannot quickly turn around and find something else profitable to do. For example, there are not enough Chinese people with the money to buy those toys. What are you going to do? The Chinese economy has to be re-geared from export to domestic. In order to believe what the Chinese are saying, you would have to believe that they have, in unbelievable short amount of time, reorganized and reoriented their economy in a time of global capitalist crisis to stop being export-dependent, as they have for the last nearly half century, and to become instead an integrated economy that produces for its own consumption. Frankly, I think the chances of that are very, very small.JAY: Now, China did spend a lot of stimulus money. Do you know? I don't know if you know what the numbers are, but they did commit to a stimulus. Is it possible it's having this kind of an effect?WOLFF: Again, I find it not credible. They have a very large stimulus—by the way, not as large as the United States', but for them a very large stimulus. No doubt it is helping. Even more impressive, 'cause you can get some numbers, they are flooding their economy with unbelievable quantities of money, cheap loans, to everybody to do everything. These are the conditions—hothouse development like this, loads of money floating around, lots of corruption. I want to remind you there are periodic stories out of China that ought to give anyone pause, for example a story in which a company announces to its workers a restructuring plan because it's in such trouble. The workers get all upset about the fear of losing their job and kill the owner-manager of the company. A record number of upheavals and riots. This is a country in enormous turmoil at a time when their markets have disappeared on them. The chances of them having the kind of growth that could support this current stock market boom in China is really not credible. And here's my worst fear, because of its implications not only for the Chinese but for the whole world, that you are seeing here a debt-driven government stimulus bubble of the classic sort, a kind of wild euphoria in which the Chinese and investors in China believe that somehow it's dodged the bullet, the bullet that has laid waste to every other economy, that is making people from Iceland to Ireland to Spain to the United States rethink all their basic strategies as businesses, as unions, as consumers, that this has all bypassed China. This is not believable.JAY: So if this is a stock market bubble—and perhaps one can call it a propaganda-driven stock market bubble—then what happens when the bubble bursts?WOLFF: The same thing that happens when bubbles burst everywhere else: lots of people lose an awful lot of money very, very quickly. Money that flows into China can flow out. The level of unemployment they've had in recent years, which because they're a large company has been sizable—tens of millions of people have lost their job—that would be considered good times if we have a burst bubble, because there's nothing else that's going to support the Chinese economy if this last-ditch effort to evade the global breakdown turns out to be, as more and more of us believe, a mirage, a bubble that cannot be sustained. For example, if you believe the Chinese, that they are producing the kinds of outputs they are, and you also believe them when they admit that their exports are shrinking, where is the stuff going? They can't sell it to their own people—they don't have the money. They can't export it. They keep producing it. That suggests they're storing it someplace, maybe hoping against hope that even though they can't sell the output now, they can pay their workers, prevent the unemployment from getting worse, and hope that they can sell it in the future. But if the recession, in terms of purchasing power, lasts for the next few years, which most of us in the West believe, left, right, and center, then they're gambling on something that will not pay off.JAY: Well, then the issue of global [inaudible] never seen the global deflation that would hit if these stored up products hit the market at ridiculously low prices.WOLFF: Right, which they'll have no choice but to do. They will have no choice but to do it. And they would dump these goods. And more than that, if they dump these goods because they cannot sustain their levels of production, then they're no longer going to do what they now admit they're doing, which is stockpiling raw materials, basic minerals and metals and so on, in the hope that they can keep up production. They'll stop all of that. And then the economies, like Australia, the United States, and Latin America, which ship iron ore and aluminum and all these oil to China, they're not going to have market anymore, and that's the only thing that sustained them in many cases, 'cause of the ties between the booming Chinese production and the producers of raw materials and inputs. So the world is all tied together. If we have a Chinese bubble as the third and final step—. We had a stock market bubble in the West, in the United States, that blew up 2000. We had a real estate bubble in the West and the United States that blew up in 2007 and '08. My fear: we're going to see in 2009 or '10 the final blown bubble, and it'll be called the Chinese bubble, and it will come at the end of the other two. And the cumulative effect is terrifying.JAY: Well, on that note, I was going to say please donate to The Real News. I think I'll probably say run for the hills. Thanks for joining us.WOLFF: Thank you for the opportunity.JAY: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network. And I wasn't serious about not donating. Donate, and then run for the hills. Thanks for joining us. Bye-bye.DISCLAIMER:Please note that TRNN transcripts are typed from a recording of the program; The Real News Network cannot guarantee their complete accuracy. |
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