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China to the rescue of U.K. economy
- The deal is China's first plunge into Britain's cash-strapped utility sector amid an aggressive campaign to woo Chinese investment
- Britons are already driving cars made in Chinese-owned factories, consuming goods made in China and may soon be riding high-speed trains built with Chinese money and expertise while London is being touted as a major offshore centre of trade in China's currency, the yuan.
- The CIC, a sovereign wealth fund created to invest China's massive foreign reserves abroad, indicated that it was keen to invest in infrastructure development in Britain.
- Its head Lou Jiwei described Britain as “one of the most open economies in the world''.
“Debt naturalisation root of U.S. meltdown”
- The naturalisation of debt as commonsense in everyday life, the dark art of “materialised mystification” and transformation of the polity into a quantity with a credit rating score were at the root of the meltdown in the U.S. capitalist economy
- Pointing to the phenomena of “financial materiality”—credit cards, stocks, bonds, housing mortgage and insurance —Prof. Appadurai stated that the single greatest source of “materialised mystification” in the financial marketplace was in the world of insurance —home turf of the central tool of probabilistic calculation or attaching a number to the unknown in modern finance that was at the heart of all financial practices.
- Pointing out that plastic money (credit/debit cards) was the key to 95 per cent material lives and accounted for 98 per cent of the net revolving debt of $ 793 billion —and given that U.S. GNP was about $ 14 trillion where one out of every $ 2,000 was some form of floating consumer debt, Prof. Appadurai said the world of plastic was very much tied to routine means of reproduction on an everyday basis and these precarious forms of debt-driven life were now commonsense to the American consumer.
- If stock prices are largely self-fulfilling phenomena of the stock market itself, bonds represented an even bigger market based on abstract and opaque valuation, while housing mortgages were bizarre instruments of “ownerships” in which the so-called home owners owned only the mortgage and not the house, except at the end point of a long horizon of amortization, Prof. Appadurai said.
- According to him, the “slice and dice” technique of redistributing parts of mortgages to produce new morphed products for resale was the key to financial collapse in 2008 and was the “driving heart of the financial beast in the U.S.”
