Skittish at the prospect of further losses, the Chinese government has taken action. On Saturday, the country’s largest brokerage firms agreed to establish a fund worth 120 billion yuan ($19.4 billion) to buy shares in the largest companies listed in the index. Beijing has also lowered interest rates, relaxed restrictions on buying stocks with borrowed money, and imposed a moratorium on initial public offerings. The country has even relied on propaganda to encourage the public to hold onto their shares for patriotic reasons.
.. The boom was fueled by retail punters relatively new to investing—according to the Financial Times, more than 12 million new accounts were opened on the stock exchange in May alone. Once dominated by elites, the stock market increasingly has become a vehicle for China’s emerging middle class. Two thirds of households who opened accounts in the first quarter of 2015 didn’t even finish high school. Equity market fever has spread to China’s universities, where 31 percent of the country’s college students have invested in a stock. Three quarters of them used money provided by their parents.
.. According toBloomberg, over 90 million people in China have invested in equities—a number greater than the total membership in the Chinese Communist Party.
Which job is more stressful – being the president of the USA or being the chairman of the People’s Republic of China?
The richest American politician is California Congressman Darrel Issa, worth $448 million USD.
In China he would be behind 165 politicians in net worth.
The Democratic Tea Party
Imperil world peace. The Pacific region will either be organized by American rules or Chinese rules. By voting against the trade deal, Democrats went a long way toward guaranteeing that Chinese rules will dominate.
As various people have noted, the Democratic vote last week was a miniversion of the effort to destroy the League of Nations after World War I. It damaged an institution that might head off future conflict.
China Making Some Missiles More Powerful
Some of China’s military modernization program has been aimed directly at America’s technological advantage. China has sought technologies to block American surveillance and communications satellites, and its major investments in cybertechnology — and probes and attacks on American computer networks — are viewed by American officials as a way to both steal intellectual property and prepare for future conflict.
The upgrade to the nuclear forces fits into that strategy.
“This is obviously part of an effort to prepare for long-term competition with the United States,” said Ashley J. Tellis
.. Today, analysts see China’s addition of multiple warheads as at least partly a response to Washington’s antimissile strides. “They’re doing it,” Mr. Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists said, “to make sure they could get through the ballistic missile defenses.”