Do you think that their new found economic
greatness or perceived greatness, post-financial
crisis-- they always believed they were a
second rate power, financially, going into
2008.
And the world seems to believe that they were
the engine of the world's growth from 2009,
2018.
Is it that economic growth that they build
their geopolitical assertiveness on in your
opinion?
Listen, since time immemorial, the access
to the Chinese market, this mystery of the
Chinese market, has always drawn in the West,
whether it's the British coming there at first,
or the East India Company, or the China schooners
from the United States-- the China trade.
It was always this thing about China.
What we've seen, and I happen to believe,
is that the Chinese economic system is built
on a house of sand.
And I think it's going to lead us to a greater
financial debacle than 2008 ever was in the
exact same culprits that led to the financial
crisis in 2008-- the investment banks, the
commercial banks, the hedge funds, and the
government entities.
It was the same elites that led to that financial
crisis and got bailed out.
They had no responsibility and no accountability.
They've been the same exact actors that have
exacerbated the situation in China.
And so yes, the reason the world's elites--
the Party of Davos, the people on Wall Street,
what I call the IR departments of China, which
are the investment banks, particularly Goldman
Sachs and some commercial banks, the lobbyists
for China, which is basically the 25 or 30
largest corporations that deal in China today--
their lobbyists in Washington, DC.
And the big private equity guys like Schwarzman
and these guys are all going to have to be
held accountable for what went on in China.
What China was able to do in basic coordination
with the elites in the West was de-industrialize
the industrial democracies of the West, both
Europe and the United States.
That's why Brexit and 2016 are inextricably
linked.
What it is is the exporting of Chinese overcapacity,
and Chinese deflation, and basic industrial
goods.
And from the Chinese point of view, it's been
quite brilliant.
They've essentially taken 350 million of their
people from working poverty to middle class,
and 400 million people from abject poverty
to working poverty.
So that's essentially 2/3 of their population,
because their population I really think is
closer to 1.3 or 1.4 billion than what they
say, 1.1.
So what they've done is heroic in 30 years
from a strategy point of view.
But that has been exacerbated by the elites
in the West who basically kind of financed
it and brought it on.
