China’s Sovereign Wealth Buying Spree Expands

Real fast here: China is floating like a Peking duck on the troubled waters of global financial collapse and the falling US empire.  A British auction house is selling a Japanese holding of Chinese palace clocks taken from Northern China during the looting of the Chinese empire.  China asserts claims over much of the South China Seas which are called something else in the US.  And GM is going bankrupt as GM executives sell stocks and Chrysler closes dealerships all over America.

The Chinese are not stupid.  They had a long, long list of industries and raw materials they wanted to control.  They relentlessly go down this checklist and this financial collapse means a fire sale of all these goodies and who has the biggest darn Sovereign Wealth Fund on earth?  China!

 

China builds rare-earth metal monopoly | The Australian

 

CHINA has triumphed in a 15-year quest to become the “ultimate monopolist” in the supply of rare earth metals – a dominance that industry experts say could give Beijing control over the future of consumer electronics and green technology.

Industry sources believe that with China dramatically cutting its annual rare earth export quotas, the time may be rapidly approaching when it will be impossible for any company to produce a wind turbine or hybrid electric car outside the communist country. 

After a long, relentless campaign of price wars and export quota reductions, more than 95 per cent of the global supply of rare earth metals – a group of 17 “lanthanide” elements employed in hundreds of technologies ranging from mobile phones and BlackBerrys to lasers and aviation – is produced by China. 

Although China has the resources and refinery capacity to produce enough lanthanum, terbium, neodymium and dysprosium to satisfy a global demand that is rising at 10 per year, its rare earth export allocation for the whole world this year is expected to be about 38,000 tonnes – less than the quantity required by Japan alone. 

Furthermore, as the world tries to make itself more energy-efficient, China’s dominant position will become more strategically critical because of the wide range of cutting-edge environmental technologies, such as wind turbines, low-energy light bulbs and hybrid cars, that depend heavily on the rare earth metals. 
 

 

OK: my very own dad, Aden Meinel, went to China after Nixon and Kissinger and my very own dad was very big on solar energy systems.  The Chinese agreed, this was a great idea, a solar energy array on every house. This is my dream, too.  Not America’s dream.  No, we wanted to build suburban McMansions and drive SUVs instead.

 

So, China built solar panel factories.  They competed with Japan and Korea in this matter but they decided to squirrel all the mineral wealth that goes into these things and voila! They did exactly that.  Congratulations to the COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA.  Again: THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA figured out what sovereign wealth was, the dangers of leveraging the buying of stuff [you lose it all if you have any price lurches or market failures!] and they figured out that OWNING stuff is better than NOT OWNING stuff and they figured out what capital is: it is NOT DEBT.  Thank you for a one-paragraph lesson in ‘How to dominate the earth.’

 

Um, we already lost WWIII.  We can’t build much of anything.  Remember Japan in WWII?  They needed um…RAW MATERIALS….and we would contest them for this.  Well, China has these things now and we have to buy from them.  If they want to squeeze our throats, they will and shall.

 

The Story of Nezu Museum Clock Collection, From Chinese Imperial Palace to Hong Kong Auction – WSJ.com

Hong Kong — When the auctioneer’s hammer came down one morning last spring in Hong Kong, it marked another turn in a journey that most likely began more than two centuries ago in Beijing’s Forbidden City. On the block were 15 clocks, mostly late-18th-century, that had been largely out of sight for 60 years. The collection was thought to have originated with Chinese Emperor Qianlong, who reigned in the middle of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911); it had belonged to the Nezu family, and later their Tokyo museum, since the early 1900s. But the museum had exhibited the collection only twice after World War II…. “Many people aren’t aware of the incredible journey a work of art may take when it is consigned” for auction, says Ms. Antebi, 45 years old, who also heads Christie’s Chinese ceramics and works of art department. “Nor the countless people involved every step of the way.”…

“People say that they do not just find works of art. Instead, they come across works of art only through personal relationships with people,” says Mr. Nezu, who turns 59 this weekend….

Such a connection led his grandfather, Kaichiro, to the imperial clock collection. During a trip to China sometime in the early 1900s — the details are long lost — someone offered to sell the Qing dynasty timepieces to Kaichiro Nezu, who was then a successful Tokyo entrepreneur with interests in railroads. He was also a shrewd art collector, buying Japanese and Chinese works at a time when other collectors were selling. He acquired 21 clocks in all (only 15 of these were sold at the Christie’s auction; one is missing, and five remain in the museum’s collection).

The Chinese communist government is always interested in the mysterious ways the imperial loot got into the hands of the European and Japanese invaders.  Note the Japanese can’t remember how they got these fine clocks…HAHAHAHA….crooks can never remember exactly how they got their loot.  They look at the cops and say, ‘Wow, how did that loot get into my house!  I have no idea!’  Yes, amnesia is the usual mental condition of thieves and pick pockets.

 

The Chinese want this stuff back.  Just like Greece wants its stuff back.  Ditto, Egypt.  Unlike Greece and Egypt, the Chinese can use hooks, crooks and outright muscle to get this stuff back as the auctioneers in Paris discovered last month.  Expect communist bids and intimidation of all other bidders.

 

Hong Kong Awaits <break/> New Central Banker – WSJ.com

Official silence over the retirement plans of Hong Kong’s de facto central banker, the only man to hold his position since it was created in 1993, is creating unease at a time when the territory is drawing closer to China’s financial orbit.

All former Chinese lands will end up back in China including Taiwan.  The US and Europe threw all their weight into destroying China via Tibet and failed.  China resumes its relentless growth, island by island while the US goes bankrupt, bombing Pakistan and Afghanistan and trying to keep our soldiers from slaughtering each other in Iraq or committing hari kari.

 

BBC NEWS |Asia-Pacific | China asserts sea border claims

GM Now Sees Bankruptcy as ‘Probable,’ Henderson Says (Update2) – Bloomberg.com 

 

General Motors Corp. Chief Executive Officer Fritz Henderson said bankruptcy is now probable as the biggest U.S. automaker races to beat a June 1 deadline to cut costs and debt to avoid it.

“It is probable” that GM will end up using the bankruptcy process, Henderson said today in a Bloomberg Television interview at the company’s headquarters in Detroit.

The comment went beyond Henderson’s May 11 assessment that resorting to court protection to reorganize was “more probable” than GM had previously thought. Henderson is signaling that GM recognizes that bankruptcy is inevitable, saidDennis Virag, president of Automotive Consulting Group Inc. in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

“They would prefer not to do it, and it would be best if they did not have to go through bankruptcy,” Virag said. “I just don’t see any way GM can successfully reorganize without it.”

China loves GM.  China will use sovereign wealth to buy the shattered remains of GM.  GM and other now-dead US car makers made the cars and jeeps and trucks that won WWI and WWII for us.  Next: Boeing.  The Chinese want Boeing and will probably get Boeing when we surrender after losing Social Security and Medicare.

 

GM Shares Plunge on Executives’ Sell-Off – washingtonpost.com

 

Shares of General Motors plunged to their lowest levels since the depths of the Great Depression yesterday following news that six GM executives sold off their company holdings.

Share prices in what was once an American corporate icon ended the day at a mere $1.15, a 20 percent drop for the day, as it seemed increasingly likely that stockholders could be left with nothing — or close to it — in the coming weeks.

 

Arrest them all.   🙂

 

UPDATE 1-GM, Chrysler to cut up to 3,000 dealers — sources | Markets | US Markets | Reuters

Hardship bites in Toyota City | Business | guardian.co.uk

Baltimore Autos Examiner: Toyota post enormous loss in 2008

The US dollar gets only 96 yen per dollar.  Wow.  This is way, way below the 120 yen to the dollar Japan needs in order to kill the US auto industry.  So they are dying, too.  Faster than us!  Isn’t that shocking?  We are Japan’s auto markets, after all.  And China plans to kill Japanese exports to the US because they will undersell Japan pretty soon.  It has just begun.  If China gets GM and maybe, even Chrysler, then Toyota can kiss its control of the US goodbye, sayonara.

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