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Yet the stimulus never really stopped. Instead, debt has become the motor at the core of Chinese growth. In absolute terms, China’s debt looks manageable. It’s difficult to measure precisely, but at the end of 2016, the total stock of nonfinancial debt in China, relative to the size of the economy, was about 260%, roughly the same as that of the United States (although some estimates put it significantly higher). However, the concern is not the total amount of debt but the speed at which it has accumulated. In 2008, China’s debt-to-GDP was only 160%. Experience shows that when a country accumulates too much debt relative to the size of its economy too quickly, a crisis typically follows. In fact, China’s debt accumulation could be among the fastest in modern history. According to the People’s Bank of China, since 2008, the Chinese economy has added about $12 trillion worth of debt, roughly the size of the entire U.S. banking system in that year. China’s banking system has quadrupled in size over the last nine years. Alarms are starting to go off in financial centers around the world.
China's Great Wall of Debt
Dinny McMahon
Bannon was still worried, though he saw some positives in the Trump-Pence strategy. They were using Pence well, Bannon believed, running him essentially on a circuit of states—at least 23 appearances in Pennsylvania; 25 in Ohio; 22 in North Carolina; 15 in Iowa; 13 in Florida; eight in Michigan; seven in Wisconsin. The theme was for Pence to campaign as if he were running for governor of those states, focusing on local issues and what a President Trump in Washington could do for the state. “And every now and then we’d pull him [Pence] out to Jesus-land,” Bannon said. Trump, he said, was essentially running as county supervisor in 41 large population centers. Bannon was amazed that the Clinton campaign did not use President Obama strategically. Obama had won Iowa in 2008 and 2012 by six to 10 points. “He never goes.” Clinton never went to Wisconsin in the general election. She didn’t talk enough about the economy. “When I saw her go to Arizona, I said, they’ve lost their fucking minds,” Bannon said. “What are they doing?”
Part of what makes recording studios somewhat odd, a little museum-like in spirit, is that the gear of the past is not always rendered obsolete, even as the very latest technologies are welcomed in. A Telefunken U47 microphone from the 1940s is a favorite among artists across genres. Still. A Fairchild 670 compressor from the 1950s—they can cost some thirty thousand dollars on the vintage market—is regularly used in the digital environments of today’s best commercial studios. “There is a mystical air about a Fairchild 670,” Pete Townshend has said. “Sorry, but that’s a fact.” Old technologies, mythic technologies, and the very latest gear mix together in a way that is singular to recording culture. With the shift from analog to digital recording, the mixing of old and new would be ever more conspicuous and common. Imagine an office in which individual workstations have equipment from different eras: a typewriter in one, a Macintosh from 1985 in the next, and, in the following cubicle, a MacBook Pro from 2022. It wouldn’t happen. When the new stuff comes in, the old goes out. Computers, printers, copiers. In a recording studio, because different eras of technology do come together, a common language must be found.
Deliver Me From Nowhere
Warren Zanes
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