There is now no denying that China's economy is slowing sharply, though this can be masked by mini-booms along the way.

China is creating credit at twice the pace of underlying growth and is relying on hazardous bubbles to keep growth running far above the safe speed limit, Fitch Ratings has warned.

Short-term stimulus is papering over deep cracks in the economy and vital reforms are being neglected, storing up serious trouble for the future.

The Fitch credit agency said state control over the banking system will prevent a sudden collapse in confidence or a western-style financial crash, but the Communist authorities are running out of tools to meet their inflated GDP targets.

China's epic catch-up boom since the early 1980s will likely sputter out this year as banks struggle with the legacy of bad debts and chronic malinvestment.  Here’s why.

America’s Nobody-in-Chief is finally going away, his last spasm of rhetorical onanism completely overshadowed by Donald Trump neatly turning the tables on the media purveyors of that pathetically fake “dossier.”

No one is listening to him. No one cares. While the helpless mainstream media frets over its irrelevance, Obama is left urging his minions to throw little tantrums out in the Deep State, trying to do just a little more damage to this country before he is finally exiled to comfortable obscurity. But payback is a Pelosi.

Soon Trump’s pen and phone are going to be wielded. All that last-minute regulatory nonsense is getting overturned. America will be a beacon of freedom to Cubans once again. The Western land thefts will be undone. We’ll drill, baby, drill. It’s going to be awesome, as will the tsunami of liberal tears.

And there’s nothing you haters can do about it. Nothing. Here’s why…

It was Harvard professor Samuel Huntington who first hurled the epithet “Davos Man” at the new elites, railing against “gold-collar workers” with no use for the nation state, and divorced from organic societies rooted in tradition.

He warned of a cosmopolitan superclass of 20 million people, with interests diverging ever further from the anthropology of the parish. This rootless supra-culture was cornering the gains of the global economy, and capturing ideological power.

“They have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations,” he wrote.

Prof. Huntington has earned his posthumous vindication. The pull of the nation and ancestral memory is stronger after all. Everything that the World Economic Forum stands for on the eve of the 47th summit in Davos is palpably under threat.

Hammers, broken windows and fights. That’s what a safe space for free speech looks like at UC Davis. 

Safe spaces are places where everyone who isn’t a safe space fascist feels unsafe. The more safe spaces a campus has, the less freedom of speech the students and faculty dare to enjoy.  

UC Davis has a great many safe spaces. 

The University of California institution has safe spaces for illegal aliens (the Undocumented Student Center) and for asexuals (the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual Resource Center) which hosted a “Tampon Tea Party.”

It has segregated safe space housing in Campbell Hall for black students and the Women's Resources and Research Center will provide safe spaces and “Mind Spa Services” for anyone offended by Christian views on abortion.

But all the safe spaces were about making life unsafe for everyone who wasn’t a left-wing fascist.

Last night (01/18), 40 hours before Donald Trump’s swearing-in as president of the United States, Taiwan’s “Representative” in the U.S. (i.e., de facto Ambassador) laid out what Taiwan wants from the relationship – and it does not include being offered up as a “bargaining chip” in the United States’ relationship with China.

Speaking at a dinner celebrating 80 years of diplomacy at Twin Oaks, the Washington, D.C. estate owned by Taiwan’s government, Representative Stanley Kao praised the current state of U.S.-Taiwan relations.

The relationship has “never been better in recent memory,” he said, even if engagement is “quiet and low-key” at times. Taiwan hopes to continue that momentum under the new Trump administration – with a caveat. The relationship “should be based on its merit and not used … as some kind of bargaining chip,” Kao said, to applause from the audience.

Kao’s comment touches on a concern that Trump may view Taiwan, formally known as the Republic of China, as a bargaining chip in the larger U.S.-China relationship.

It was the end of the big year with three zeroes. The first X-Men movie had broken box office records. You couldn’t set foot in a supermarket without listening to Brittney Spears caterwauling, “Oops, I Did It Again.” And Republicans and Democrats had total control of both chambers of legislatures in the same amount of states.

That was the way it was back in the distant days of the year 2000.

In 2016, Republicans control both legislative chambers in 32 states. That’s up from 16 in 2000.

What happened to the big donkey? Among other things, the Democrats decided to sell their base and their soul to a very bad billionaire and they got a very bad deal for both.  Here’s the story.

Inflation rage is coming to the boil in Germany. Leaders of the country's prestigious institutes warn that the economy is hitting capacity constraints and risks spiraling into a destructive boom-bust cycle.

In a series of interviews with yours truly they said that the ultra-loose monetary policy of the European Central Bank is now badly out of alignment with German needs. It has begun to threaten lasting damage, and is fast undermining political consent for monetary union.

"The ECB wants to inflate away the debt of the southern European countries. This is a clear conflict of interest with net creditors like Germany," says Clemens Fuest, president of the IFO Institute in Munich.

The tabloid newspaper Bild Zeitung leapt on the latest price data, splashing with a "Horror-Kurve" showing inflation soaring to seemingly frightening heights.

An example is the UBS bubble index showing that Munich is now the fifth most expensive housing market in the world, with prices that have "increasingly lost touch with economic fundamentals.”