Monthly Archives: January 2010

China Wildcard

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You are going to think I’m totally mad but I have a gut feeling that China is going to collapse. Not today. Not next week. Not even next year. But I think that within the next ten years – maybe fifteen – it’s going to fall over. Why? First of all its economy displays all the classic signs of a bubble. Look at real estate for example. Secondly, it’s banking system contains too many bad loans and, third, the population has an imbalance of young males. Why is the latter an issue? Because if growth stalls (well under 4% say) and unemployment rises substantially there could be big trouble. I’m almost certainly wrong. This is something that’s possible rather than something that’s probable. But if China did collapse what would happen in the rest of the world? Has anyone run any scenarios against this? What would the oil price do for instance? Or how about what happens if China stops buying US debt? Yikes.

The Passing of Time

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Just been sent this book for my birthday. Quite funny. Quite frightening too. BTW, nice quote in the FT from Christopher Caldwell: ” Although we organise our lives around time measured chronometrically, chronometry is not the way we instinctively measure time. The relevant instinctual unit we use to reckon time’s passage is the lifetime.”

Digital Death

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Regular readers might (just) remember that one of my top 10 trends for 2009 (i.e. last year) was ‘Digital Diets’. It didn’t happen. But wait…it’s happening now!

This is just in from Sean Boyle at JWT in New York. Rock star John Mayer has blogged* that his fans should join him for a weekly ‘digital cleanse.’ Meanwhile, if things really get too much you can now use something called the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine.

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No, this isn’t anything physically nasty. Just a way of getting rid of your digital friends. Once you nominate a social network you relinquish your login details to the machine and it proceeds to change your password so that you can no longer access your account. It then systematically deletes every one of your friends from that particular platform and frees you from the shackles of social media.Facebook has blocked the application but Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn have yet to do so.

* I know, the irony of doing this on a blog!

Newspaper Statistics (not what you think)

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Newspapers are dying right? Wrong. Newspaper circulation grew by 1.3% worldwide in 2008 to almost 540m daily sales. Adding the free daily papers, the circulation increase was 1.62% – or 13% over the previous 5 years. Overall, 1.9 billion people read a daily newspaper and newspapers reach 41% more people than the internet. OK, in 2008 in the US there was a fall of 3.7% , whilst in Europe the fall was 1.8% but so what? The model isn’t broken. It’s just that some titles are badly run, have too much debt and are in the wrong regions.

Scenarios for the End of America

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Nice article on Slate a while back titled How Is America Going To End? by Josh Levin. Essentially a brief look at the ways in which the US could come to a sticky end over the next 100 years. Overall it’s highly unlikely that the US will ‘end’ but a low probability/high impact event could have some really significant consequences.

Here are a just two of the ideas:

Radical War
What happens when a large group of young, unemployed and disillusioned Hispanics comes up against a small population of relatively affluent whites? This reminds me of China where there is a huge imbalance of young males. This is OK if the economy is booming, not so OK if it tanks.

Human 2.0
What happens when the ordinary people encounter a group of synthetically engineered and biologically enhanced supermen and women? Sounds crazy but it isn’t. Income inequality is increasing significantly and we already have a group of transnational executives that can afford the best schools, the best healthcare (which includes body modification and brain training) and the best transport and security.