All in all it's just - another BRIC in the wall.

Brazil, India and China;- they have avoided the lazy, debt-ridden, west's crisis. Get the workers to work for $2 a day without health or welfare! Capitalism still works. You have just got to let it breath!

Hold on.

Ms Rousseff, new(ish) president of Brazil has in fact presided over a steep slowdown in growth from 7.5 per cent year-on-year in 2010 to around 2 per cent in the third quarter. (FT)

Then there is India. Mukesh Ambami is the richest man in India and he has just built himself a new house on Altamount Rd in Mumbai. It has 27 floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, a vertical lawn and 600 servants.  The 100 richest people in India own assets equivalent to a quarter of the gross domestic product. (That is the value of every service and all the goods produced by all the 1.2 billion Indians in a year.) India's spectacular but jobless growth is now dropping like a stone. Foreign investment is pulling out. Arunhati Roy calls it not so much a trickle down economy as a 'gush-up.' There are 300 million in a new middle class. And then there are the other 800 million who, to quote her;
"Have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less tham 50 cents a day" (FT 14 Jan.) 250 000 indebted peasant farmers killed themselves last year. Barbarism.

What about China though? They are still flying. Aren't they? '

Well...we already know about the levels of unrest. (Blog Jan 13 and passim.) But what about the the bigger picture? I've been reading a book called 'Red Capitalism' by two longstanding US merchant bankers, both fluent in Mandarin, called Walter and Howie. They want profit out of China. And they point out that the government's efforts to build huge Chinese companies (to keep out, and to compete abroad with mainly US corporations) meant huge loans made by the big 4 Chinese banks and these loans are going sour. The companies are barely able to pay the interest. The banks are under-capitalised. The banks are owned by the state and the authors judge that Chinese public debt was 76% of GDP at the end of 2009. (The 63% figure of public debt in the US as of 2010 dropped Obama to a small minority in the polls and built the T Party.) In other words, in order to reduce the power of foreign capital and increase the power of Chinese corporations, the Chinese banks have got into serious trouble. Their unpaid debts are are used as half of their own security.  By 2019 those loans will need to be officially defaulted. Meanwhile, and despite desperate efforts to buy in Europe, Latin America and Africa, there is nowhere else on earth big enough or flexible enough to soak up Chinese wealth from their trading surpluses than US government debts. So China owns more and more of US government debt.

Capitalist, market economics in China is deeply flawed. Conflicting pressures are mounting. The explosion is coming.

We need a bit of fun after all that, don't we? More on Milibean soon.