Chinese Banks

Some say China could be a house of cards based on the size of their banks, their non performing loans/debt, and low commodity prices.

Chinese banks have about $35T in assets but about 20% (and growing) are bad loans with no chance of improving. Recall many loans were for huge downtown skylines, cities, freeways, and bridges that remain largely unused. Chinese citizens invested in second and third homes in the hopes they would appreciate in value. Now the government is letting bankrupt companies default and setting aside hundreds of millions of dollars to lay off millions of employees.

Chinese banks grew ten fold in the last 10 years and now are about 3x the size of US banks but carry many times more debt. Chinese loans are based on politics and not credit worthiness. China is still cutting their teeth and their first credit crisis looks like it will be a doozy - even riots and civil war. That should keep them busy for a while.

China is just taking a queue from our Fed. Print endless money.

If a crisis comes to China, they'll just clamp down and kill until its over. The population there is still unarmed sheep.

China and Russia can bang the drum all day long. At the end of the day they have large 2nd rate armies and navies. While people panic on how fast both countries are spending money for military use, they both are far behind in spending as much as America.

Some might question America's real appetite for war against someone who actually has a military and can fight back and kill us in great numbers. Real fight, meaning signing up to fight.  Not the shallow FB profile page with the USA flag.   American's have become numb to war.  As long as both of my daughters have been on this earth, our nation has been at "war" with someone.  We don't see the blood, mangled bodies, see death as we did in Vietnam.  Thus one of the reasons, the people are isolated and insulated from the actual occurrences of death in totality.

Lose a couple surface ships or aircraft carriers this outright desire for war at any cost may start to waver when C5's are coming back here loaded with coffins.  Why does it have to come to this?  Are we so forthright to simple engulf our own propganda or somehow think our goverment or powerstructure doesn't manufacture most of who and what are enemies are?

Just can't help but think anything on the surface is a sitting duck.  No matter all the marketing in how good we think our stuff is.

Many don't believe Russia or China is as second rate as our propaganda makes them out to be.  Over 20 million Russians died in WWII, more than all the Jews, more than all the American's combined. That's pretty tall order when establishing will to fight and or die for country.  Then look at what makes up the American population today.  Where are all these war fighters going to come from? LGBYTUA community? Feminists?  Illegals?  Refugees from Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Nicaragua going to sign up?  So when it comes to to "will to fight", some of us question the will once we engage with a real enemy that can kill us back in great numbers.  Those Navy sailors captured in the Persian Gulf by Iran sure didn't display much will, they gave up their weapons, surrendered their ships, and even violated capture protocol, they said a lot more than name, rank and SN.

Amazed in our brazen approach to throw out the term "Russian aggression" or the "Chinese existential threat to the world for building islands in the South China sea".  Have the same people that deem these actual activities of these countries compared them to the US adventures and bases abroad for empire?  The US has over 700 foreign military installations in over 140 countries across the globe.  Do as we say not as we do mentality.

A moment of thought and humility might aught to prevail.  We've never been at war, actual military conflict of nation(s) that also possessed nuclear capability.  That should cause pause for any human being to reflect on crossing that threshold.

Ironic how in the 80's Reagan spent the Russians into collapse and the fall of the country.  Now we could never look into the mirror to see us spending to our collapse. SecDef Ash Carter in recent remarks admits that around half of all US discretionary spend is for the DoD.  And by the context of his remarks look for this spend to skyrocket in the near term.  All the while we can't account for over a third of the spend on average annually. Legislation was passed in the 90's mandating anuual finaical audits of the DoD, an audit as still yet to occur.  http://www.defense.gov/News/News-Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/648901/remarks-by-secretary-carter-on-the-budget-at-the-economic-club-of-washington-dc

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And it's that budget I'd like to discuss with you this morning. A week from now, President Obama will release his administration's budget for fiscal year 2017. About half of its discretionary portion -- that is, $582.7 billion, to be precise -- will be allocated for the Department of Defense.

Mind you only a portion of the total military and security spend is funneled into the DoD.

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DOD began embarking on a major strategy shift to sustain our lead in full spectrum war fighting.

Maybe we should change the department name back to "War Department".  Ironic in that the War Department was the name when we only fought in wars of absolute necessity, rename it to Defense Department, and we can't find enough wars to start or fight in.

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In this context, Russia and China are our most stressing competitors. They have developed and are continuing to advance military system that seek to threaten our advantages in specific areas. And in some case, they are developing weapons and ways of wars that seek to achieve their objectives rapidly, before they hope, we can respond.

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For example, we've recently been hitting ISIL with so many GPS-guided smart bombs and laser-guided rockets that we are starting to run low on the ones that we use against terrorists the most. So we're investing $1.8 billion in FY17, to buy over 45,000 more of them.

That's a lot of bombs if the radical Islam problem is only believed by a few as we're told.  Religion of peace, right.

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Another near-term investment in the budget is how we are reinforcing our posture in Europe to support our NATO allies in the face of Russia's aggression. In Pentagon parlance, this is called the European Reassurance Initiative and after requesting about $800 million for last year, this year we're more than quadrupling it for a total of $3.4 billion in 2017.

The other NATO countries contribute squat to funding or actual war fighting.  Why bother when the US is so willing to fight and pay for more war.  There's the key word again Russian Aggression.  The ever changing ever evolving boogie man.  Next up, Iran NK, etc etc etc

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Another project uses swarming autonomous vehicles in all sorts of ways and in multiple domains. In the air, they develop micro-drones that are really fast, really resistant. They can fly through heavy winds and be kicked out the back of a fighter jet moving at Mach 0.9, like they did during an operational exercise in Alaska last year, or they can be thrown into the air by a soldier in the middle of the Iraqi desert.

Coming to a police department near you.

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They've also got a project on gun-based missile defense, where we're taking some of the same hypervelocity smart projectiles that we developed for the electromagnetic gun. That's the railgun. And using it for point defense. By firing it with artillery, we already have in our inventory, including the five-inch guns on the front of every Navy destroyer and also the hundreds of Army Paladin self-propelled howitzers.

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One of these is undersea capabilities, where we continue to dominate and where the budget invests over $8.1 billion in 2017 and more than $40 billion over the next five years to give us the most lethal undersea and any submarine force in the world. It buys more advanced maritime control aircraft. And it not only buys nine of our most advanced Virginia Class attack submarines over the next five years, it also equips –more of them with a versatile Virginia payloads module, which triples each submarine's platform strike capacity from 12 Tomahawk missiles to 40.

And we still can't stop a jihadi from using a couple hundred dollars of materials to blow up people anywhere they want.

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I made several announcements over the last few months to help to do that. We're opening all remaining combat positions to women, very simply, so that we have access to 50 percent of our population for the all-volunteer force. And every American who can meet our exacting standards, and that's important, will have the equal opportunity to contribute to our mission.

Translation we need more people to die for the wars we want to fight.

The Feds endless money supply assures that that the government can continue to borrow to buy more war gear. On the other end this spend has no limitation, more war, larger war. We love war, we love funding it, we just aren't very good in paying for it.

While we do have a more modern Navy, I think the American People will be surprised as to how many carriers get sunk in the opening hours of a war against Russia, China, or Iran.

Most Americans believe that we were the saviors of the World after WWII. The fact is that beside fighting Japan, America was a sideshow to the Russian military that fought and lost millions and would have sacrificed many more millions of its people to win.

This is by no means meant to say that many American lives were honorably lost in the battlefields during that time. We did the right thing in fighting WWII, but we also intentional let Russia take the brunt of the fighting up to close to the end of the war.