China is perilously close to a devaluation crisis as the yuan threatens to break through the floor of its currency basket, despite massive intervention by the central bank to defend the exchange rate.

The country burned through at least $120bn of foreign reserves in December, twice the previous record, the clearest evidence to date that capital outflows have reached systemic proportions.

“There is certainly a sense that the situation is spiraling out of control,” says Mark Williams, from Capital Economics.

China’s reserves have dwindled from $4 trillion to $3.33 trillion and are no longer far from the $2.6 trillion deemed to be the prudent threshold by the International Monetary Fund, given China’s $1.2 trillion dollar liabilities.

In economic parlance, China is trapped in what is known as the Impossible Trinity.

No one wants to buy electric cars, Bloomberg reports (1/06):

“Americans bought just 102,600 such vehicles in 2015, a 17 percent decline from the previous year, according to researcher Autodata. Nissan Motor Co. sold 43 percent fewer of its all-electric Leaf and General Motors Co. reported an 18 percent drop for its Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in model that’s driven by an electric motor and has a gasoline engine to recharge its batteries.”

And who can blame them?

Apart from being poky and tinny and smug and expensive and utterly useless for long distances, electric cars are also terrible for health and the environment, as even environmentalist Bill Gates has recognized.

This is the glory of the untrammeled economic system: it is the collective product of million upon million voluntary decisions by free individuals. No economist, no government functionary could ever replicate this system through management or regulation because they could never hope to gain access to the complex and ever-changing data which informs all these consumer decisions.

But that’s never going to stop Obama from trying, is it? Last night (1/12) in his thankfully final SOTU, he blathered on about how “we’ve got to accelerate the transition away from dirty energy.” That was just after he took credit for “gas under two bucks a gallon.”

It’s the ethanol, Sherlock. As in IBD’s editorial yesterday (1/05): A Profile In Courage In Iowa: Cruz Won't Bow To Ethanol Lobby.

Ted Cruz thinks he's going to win Iowa on Feb 1^st, and then compete for the nomination with whomever of the establishment candidates wins New Hampshire on Feb 9^th. But he's selling himself short. He should also win New Hampshire.

Winning both would give him the clear momentum to win South Carolina on Feb 20^th, Nevada Feb 23^rd, SC 20^th, NV 23^rd ST March 1^st

allowing him to wrap up the nomination on Super Tuesday March 1^st with 45% of the delegates needed (565 out of 1236).  

Here’s the key: if Cruz wins Iowa, he will have defeated the ethanol lobby. And beating Big Corn on its home turf is what can propel him to a win in New Hampshire.

People in New Hampshire hate ethanol. Ethanol is corrosive, it destroys engines. Go to any tavern in New Hampshire and you'll hear an earful. And they despise craven politicians seeking the White House whoring in Iowa for the votes of a special interest that the rest of the country is forced to put up with – like Donald Trump, declaring “I love ethanol” at rallies in the state.

For more than 200 years, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, based on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale.

It centers on the question of how to control human population growth and it answers that question by saying we must be cruel to be kind, that ends justify means. It is still around today; and it could not be more wrong. It is the continuing misuse of Malthus.

According to his epitaph in Bath Abbey, the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), was noted for “his sweetness of temper, urbanity of manners and tenderness of heart, his benevolence and his piety.” Yet his ideas have justified some of the greatest crimes in  history.

By saying that, if people could not be persuaded to delay marriage, we would have to encourage famine and “reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases,” he inadvertently gave birth to a series of heartless policies — social Darwinism, eugenics, the Holocaust, India’s forced sterilizations, China’s one-child policy – and remains a hero to the environmental movement to this day.

Al Gore, for example, could be a poster child for Malthusian misanthropy.