How can China’s stimulus plan be working so well, when ours is barely working at all? The answer may be simple: China has not let its banking system run roughshod over its productive economy. Chinese banks work for the people rather than the reverse.” Ellen Brown
MASH dude Demarco slays the China Banks
Ellen Brown | Global Research | August 18, 2009
“The banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. They frankly own the place.” — U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, Democratic Party Whip, April 30, 2009
While the U.S. spends trillions of dollars to bail out its banking system, leaving its economy to languish, China is being called a “miracle economy” that has decoupled from the rest of the world. As the rest of the world sinks into the worst recession since the 1930s, China has maintained a phenomenal 8% annual growth rate. Those are the reports, but commentators are dubious. They ask how that growth is possible, when other countries relying heavily on exports have suffered major downturns and remain in the doldrums. Economist Richard Wolff skeptically observes:
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, at most 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.”
Bank of China to ‘cherry-pick’ UK mortgage customers as lending drought persists
Telegraph.co.uk | 20 Aug 2009
Bank of China, the country’s third biggest bank, plans to ‘cherry-pick’ UK mortgage customers as the lending drought in Britain remains.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Xixu Sun, the head of Bank of China’s retail operations in the UK, said “before the financial crisis you didn’t have a choice, you couldn’t cherry-pick the good customers.
Now you have that choice, because there’s a drought in terms of mortgage loans provided by banks.”
Bank of China is looking to become a major household name in Britain’s mortgage market, which has seen lending slump as the recession drives up bad loans at many banks. Although house prices have showed signs of stabilisng in recent weeks, the volume of mortgages approved is still less than half the 108,000 monthly average seen between the boom years of 2003 and 2007.
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