Anatole Kaletsky — China-Russia is a match made in heaven, and that’s scary

Western analysis of the geopolitical and geostrategic significance of the Russian-Chinese rapprochement sparked by the crisis in Ukraine. One sided but insightful.

Reuters
China-Russia is a match made in heaven, and that’s scary
Anatole Kaletsky | Chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, founder and co-chairman of GaveKal Dragonomics, an economic consulting and asset management group based in Hong Kong and Beijing, and a columnist for Reuters and the International Herald Tribune
(h/t Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism)

Kaletsky is an out of the box thinker who proposes that apparently intractable problems can be solved by leapfrogging, on the assumption that nothing is written in stone so all institutions are potentially adaptable to changing conditions through flexibility. See his, Suddenly, quantitative easing for the people seems possible

Last week I discussed in this column the idea that the vast amounts of money created by central banks and distributed for free to banks and bond funds – equivalent to $6,000 per man, woman and child in America and £6,500 in Britain – should instead be given directly to citizens, who could spend or save it as they pleased. I return to this theme so soon because radical ideas about monetary policy suddenly seem to be gaining traction. Some of the world’s most powerful central bankers – Mario Draghi of the European Central Bank last Thursday, Eric Rosengren of the Boston Fed on Monday and Mervyn King of the Bank of England this Wednesday – are starting to admit that the present approach to creating money, known as quantitative easing, is failing to generate economic growth. Previously taboo ideas can suddenly be mentioned.