The levy applies at nearly every stage of a trust’s life,
from establishment to profit distribution and wind-up. Individuals must
also declare and settle outstanding taxes on assets already transferred
into such structures within 90 days of the rules’ release – by Oct. 21 – or face surcharges for late filing or non-payment.
While the rules ended decades of regulatory ambiguity about the
vehicles, they have also created fresh confusion over implementation.
Trusts established after 2023 face the 20% charge at inception, but it
remains unclear how many years back owners of older structures, which
are subject to an annual recurring tax, must declare, said Yuan Cao,
Beijing-based partner of law firm Yingke.
Advisors also warn that many trust assets could fall afoul of foreign-investment reporting rules issued
in July, potentially inviting scrutiny from foreign-exchange
authorities over how the money left China in the first place.
... The tax push comes as Beijing hunts for new sources of fiscal revenue.
Land sales, long a mainstay of local government finances, have collapsed
amid the property downturn.
... “These measures can easily create a sense that a storm is gathering,”
said Neo Wang, chief China strategist at Evercore ISI, who added that
these concerns may be overdone. ...
Except Meyerson can't bring himself to use the word fascist, let alone Party-State.
"State capitalist power" is his polite euphemism for fascist power, which leftists who want to be taken seriously still must use apparently, ever since
George Orwell said in 1944 that fascism had become a meaningless term, you know, like the words man and woman.
He stops short, too, of saying that there is something suicidal built into the West.
The conservative Oswald Spengler identified that something as Christian theology. He said it was the grandmother of Bolshevism, which is probably why Meyerson doesn't mention it! Don't wanna upset the fascists, the Christians, AND the true believers all at the same time.
But the fact remains that the heirs of Christianity in America have sold the rope to the Chicoms which they will use to hang our children after they are finished impoverishing them.
Meanwhile Utopia still exists for Meyerson, in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark, cold, wet, snowy, and dark NATO nations which rely on the American nuclear umbrella for their security.
... there is no such communist power [like the USSR] today.
There’s China, a
Leninist-verging-on-tech-infused-Stalinist state capitalist power, but
it boasts no virtually ideological adherents either in the States or
abroad, and certainly not within the Democratic Socialists of America.
It does have spies, and thugs who intimidate dissidents in the Chinese
diaspora, but it lacks any support within the actual American left. To
be sure, China’s rise to economic world power was fueled by offshoring
American companies, but they went to China at the prompting of Wall
Street as a way to boost their profit margins, Chinese labor then being
dirt cheap. In other words, it was our leading capitalists, rather than
any American socialists or communists, who sold out the industrial
Midwest. ...
The U.S. has issued a sweeping rollback of sanctions on Iranian oil,
allowing dollar-denominated trade for the first time in more than four
decades ...
The U.S. Treasury on Monday issued a wide-ranging 60-day exemption allowing Iran to produce and sell crude oil, petrochemical and petroleum products in U.S. dollars through Aug. 21. ...
The move on Monday marks the most sweeping rollback of American oil sanctions against Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution,
reversing years of pressure designed to cripple Iran’s economy, and is
expected to deliver billions in oil revenue for the Iranian regime. ...
U.S. President Donald Trump defended the lifting
of the sanctions, saying on Monday that any oil profits were meant for
Iran to purchase American agricultural goods, rather than rebuild its
military. ...
“With dollar clearing now authorized, expect China to accelerate
purchases aggressively,” said Maleki. Chinese buyers, in the past, have
settled transactions through opaque channels to avoid secondary U.S.
sanctions exposure. ...
He expects a rapid storage “top-off cycle” under which Chinese buyers
could rush to replenish stockpiles before the exemption expires in
August.
China currently purchases roughly 90% of Iran’s oil
exports, with teapots accounting for the bulk of China’s imports. The
country’s crude imports shrank by an unprecedented 4.8 million barrels per day (mbd)
between February and May — a steeper drop than the 4 mbd decline seen
during the depths of the pandemic in the second half of 2020, according
to JPMorgan. ...
Iran will likely use this 60-day window to repair war-damaged oil
facilities and lock in longer-term contracts with Chinese buyers, said
Michael Feller, chief strategist at Geopolitical Strategy. “This will be
a huge boost to Iran, both to its economy and its sense of victory.”
Does THE GRAUNIAD even know that Sparta won that war?
Does Xi?
Meanwhile "Make America Great Again" handed our adversaries the rhetorical cudgel of decline wielded by Xi against Trump.
America is great when it stands for human freedom, something Trump is too shallow to grasp. The very word strikes terror into the hearts of the Chicoms, and is our greatest weapon against them.
But under Trump America has betrayed freedom in Ukraine, and acted more like imperial Athens in the Persian Gulf than like Sparta.
The attack on Iran is looking more and more like the failed Sicilian Expedition every day.
... "By allocating to RMB bonds, foreign investors can reduce portfolio volatility and improve risk-adjusted returns." ... "In the face of frequent geopolitical risks, the safe-haven role of RMB bonds has emerged," Yu said, adding that as the RMB internationalization progresses, demand for RMB assets as reserves is growing, and this is expected to support the growth of RMB bonds holdings by central banks and sovereign wealth funds.
LOL, what a crock.
Foreign investors own less than $1 trillion of Chinese debt, compared with over $9 trillion of U.S. debt.
... [U.S.] Treasuries are relied upon by global central banks as the pre-eminent reserve asset, since the $30tn market for the securities is the biggest and deepest in the world. ...
... “China could have held these vessels at port, imposed an
administrative delay, invented a customs hold — any number of
bureaucratic tools, but didn’t,” said Isaac Kardon, a senior fellow at
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, to The Post. “That’s a
deliberate policy choice made during an active war in which Beijing
publicly calls for restraint.”
Although IRISL operates as a large commercial carrier, Kardon said the
circumstances of these shipments strongly suggest the cargo is sodium
perchlorate. “Given the track record, the most parsimonious explanation
is that they’re loading the same commodity they’ve been shuttling for
the past year-plus,” he said. ...
The U.S. and Israel strikes have hammered Iran’s missile storage
bunkers and underground depots. “Tehran’s need for propellant precursors
just went from urgent to existential,” Kardon told The Post.
... European intelligence sources say several shipments of
sodium perchlorate, the main precursor in the production of the solid
propellant that powers Iran’s mid-range conventional missiles, have
arrived from China to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas since the
so-called “snapback” mechanism was triggered at the end of September.
Those sources say the shipments, which began arriving on
September 29, contain 2,000 tons of sodium perchlorate bought by Iran
from Chinese suppliers in the wake of its 12-day conflict with Israel in June.
The purchases are believed to be part of a determined effort to rebuild
the Islamic Republic’s depleted missile stocks. Several of the cargo
ships and Chinese entities involved are under sanctions from the United
States. ...
... “When you are facing a nonmarket economy like China, then you have to exercise industrial policy,” Bessent told Sara Eisen at CNBC’s Invest in America Forum in Washington, D.C.
“So we’re going to set price floors and the forward buying to make
sure that this doesn’t happen again and we’re going to do it across a
range of industries,” the Treasury secretary said, without naming
specific industries the administration was looking at beyond rare
earths. ...
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” the Treasury secretary said when asked
about additional equity stakes. “When we get an announcement like this
week with China on the rare earths, you realize we have to be
self-sufficient, or we have to be sufficient with our allies.”
The
Trump administration will not take stakes in nonstrategic industries,
Bessent said. “We do have to be very careful not to overreach,” he said. ...
This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.
China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France. So call this variant “state capitalism with American characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.
We wouldn’t be dabbling with state capitalism if not for the public’s and both parties’ belief that free-market capitalism wasn’t working. That system encouraged profit-maximizing CEOs to move production abroad. The result was a shrunken manufacturing workforce, dependence on China for vital products such as critical minerals, and underinvestment in the industries of the future such as clean energy and semiconductors.
The federal government has often waded into the corporate world. It commandeered production during World War II and, under the Defense Production Act, emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic. It bailed out banks and car companies during the 2007-09 financial crisis. Those, however, were temporary expedients.
Former PresidentJoe Bidenwent further, seeking to shape the actual structure of industry. His Inflation Reduction Act authorized $400 billion in clean-energy loans. The Chips and Science Act earmarked $39 billion in subsidies for domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Of that,$8.5 billion went to Intel, giving Trump leverage to demand the removal of its CEO over past ties to China. (Intel so far has refused.)
Biden officials had mulled a sovereign-wealth fund to finance strategically important but commercially risky projects such as in critical minerals, which China dominates. Last month, Trump’s Department of Defense said it would takea 15% stake in MP Materials, a miner of critical minerals.
Many in the West admire China for its ability to turbocharge growth through massive feats of infrastructure building, scientific advance and promotion of favored industries. American efforts are often bogged down amid the checks, balances and compromises of pluralistic democracy.
In his forthcoming book, “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future,” authorDan Wangwrites: “China is an engineering state, building big at breakneck speed, in contrast to the United States’ lawyerly society, blocking everything it can, good and bad.”
To admirers, Trump’s appeal is his willingness to bulldoze those lawyerly obstacles. He has imposed tariffs on an array of countries and sectors, seizing authority that is supposed to belong to Congress. He extracted $1.5 trillion in investment pledges from Japan, the European Union and South Korea that he claims he will personally direct, though no legal mechanism for doing so appears to exist. (Those pledges are already in dispute.)
There are reasons state capitalism never caught on before. The state can’t allocate capital more efficiently than private markets. Distortions, waste and cronyism typically follow. Russia, Brazil and France have grown much more slowly than the U.S.
Chinese state capitalism isn’t the success story it seems.Barry Naughtonof the University of California, San Diego has documented howChina’s rapid growth since 1979has come from market sources, not the state. As Chinese leaderXi Jinpinghas reimposed state control, growth has slowed. China is awash with savings, but the state wastes much of it. From steel to vehicles, excess capacity leads to plummeting prices and profits.
State capitalism is an all-of-society affair in China, directed from Beijing via millions of cadres in local governments and company boardrooms. In the U.S., it consists largely of Oval Office announcements lacking any policy or institutional framework. “The core characteristic of China’s state capitalism is discipline, and Trump is the complete opposite of that,” Wang said in an interview.
State capitalism is a means of political, not just economic, control. Xi ruthlessly deploys economic levers to crush any challenge to party primacy. In 2020,Alibabaco-founderJack Ma, arguably the country’s most famous business leader, criticized Chinese regulators for stifling financial innovation. Retaliation was swift. Regulatorscanceled the initial public offeringof Ma’s financial company, Ant Group, and eventuallyfined it $2.8 billionfor anticompetitive behavior. Ma briefly disappeared from public view.
Trump has similarly deployed executive orders and regulatory powers against media companies, banks, law firms and other companies he believes oppose him, while rewarding executives who align themselves with his priorities.
In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade. Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.
Trump is also seeking political control over agencies that have long operated at arm’s length from the White House, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. That, too, has echoes of China where the bureaucracy is fully subordinate to the ruling party.
Trump has long admired the control Xi exercises over his country, but there are, in theory, limits to how far he can emulate him.
American democracy constrains the state through an independent judiciary, free speech, due process and the diffusion of power among multiple levels and branches of government. How far state capitalism ultimately displaces free-market capitalism in the U.S. depends on how well those checks and balances hold up.
The 2001 anthrax letter attacks CAME from anthrax STORED at Fort Detrick, which was the government's bioweapons research facility from way back in 1943 during WWII, until it became politically suicidal to say that and they snapped their fingers and presto!, it became a biodefense research facility.
The researcher there responsible for the anthrax attacks committed suicide as investigators finally got close to him.
James Comey and Robert Mueller infamously tried to frame the wrong guy for the crime. You know those guys, the guys who relentlessly went after Donald Trump.
DHS didn't even exist until March 2003.
I mean, c'mon Newsweek.
Fort Detrick is also suspiciously close to the location of a facility where elderly people came down with an unknown respiratory illness and died in summer 2019, which I think might have been a precursor to COVID-19. Most people now believe the Chicom lab at Wuhan was the lab from which coronavirus leaked, but I think Fort Detrick and Wuhan were cooperating at the time because bioweapons research was technically forbidden in the USA but they farmed it out to Wuhan on the sly, perhaps through Peter Daszak and Ecohealth-Alliance which got grants connected with Anthony Fauci. I speculate something leaked into the USA in summer 2019 from Fort Detrick.
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence from people in America and abroad that there was a very severe flu-like illness already on the loose in the second half of 2019 which they commonly describe as the worst flu they ever had.
Meanwhile Fort Detrick has been perennially notorious for failing inventory protocols for the HAZMAT stored there, for shoddy maintenance and record keeping, and for leaking waste water into the local environment.
That ICE Barbie fell ill after a visit to Fort Detrick is really one hell of a coincidence.
"At present there are absolutely no negotiations on the economy and trade
between China and the U.S.,” said Ministry of Commerce Spokesperson He
Yadong. ... "If the U.S. really wants to resolve the problem ... it should cancel all the unilateral measures on China,” He said.
“The law is very precise, and the only way to extend that is if there
is an actual deal in the works,” Johnson added. “I think President
Trump is probably intrigued by all this and he likes to make deals, as
you know. So we’re very hopeful that that can happen, and that 270
million American people who enjoy the platform can enjoy it, but enjoy
it safely and not have their data being mined by our nation’s enemy.”
The attacks, where drivers mow down people on foot or knife-wielding
assailants stab multiple victims, are not new in China. But the latest
surge drew attention. ...
In November alone, three took place: A man struck people at an
elementary school in Hunan province, wounding 30, after suffering
investment losses. A student who failed his examination stabbed and killed eight
at a vocational school in the city of Yixing. The most victims, 35
people, resulted from a man mowing down a crowd in the southern city of
Zhuhai, supposedly upset over his divorce. ...
In eastern Anhui province, a ruling Communist Party leader ... said they must “thoroughly and meticulously investigate and resolve
conflicts and disputes,” including in families, marriages and
neighborhoods. ...
The Ministry of Justice promised to curtail conflicts by looking into
squabbles over inheritance, housing, land and unpaid wages.
Jenna Wang, 59, claims the VP hopeful
showered her with gifts and seduced her at his poky staff accommodation
at No. 1 High School in Foshan, Guangdong Province. ...
'Tim was very passionate and very
romantic. I can still remember dancing with him to our favorite song,
Careless Whisper,' she told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview. 'The fact we couldn't touch or kiss in public just made it all the more exciting and intense when we were finally alone. We were deeply in love and I wanted to
marry him and start a family. When it didn't happen, I felt very unhappy
and sad. Tim's behavior was very selfish. ... This
is a very crucial moment in history and a man like this does not appear
to have the character and integrity to do one of the most important
jobs in the world.'
"They are Philippine Navy vessels, and according to international law, they enjoy what we term as sovereign immunity,” Koh said. “That is very dangerous, because, if anything, that could even be construed as an act of war.”
Instead of bailing out a bunch of deadbeat ingrates' student loans for votes in November maybe demagogue Joe Biden should have built some ships to help us fulfill our promises to our freedom-loving friends around the world.
The U.S. has rapidly overwhelmed China as the world’s top spot for millionaires and billionaires, according a new report.
There
are now more than 5.5 million Americans with liquid investible assets
of more than $1 million, up 62% over the past decade and well above the
global growth rate of 38%, according to the 2024 USA Wealth Report from Henley & Partners and New World Wealth.
Over
the past five years, the population of millionaires in the U.S. has
grown 35%, nearly twice as fast as China’s. The U.S. is now home to 37%
of the world’s millionaires, up from 35% in 2018.
The divergence
grows even more at the top of the wealth ladder. The U.S. has 9,850
centi-millionaires — those worth $100 million or more — compared with
China’s 2,352. The U.S. has about 788 billionaires to China’s 305.
“The USA remains the world’s undisputed leader in private wealth creation and accumulation,” according to the report.
Dominic Volek, group head of private clients at Henley, said the strict Covid lockdowns in China coupled with increases in its government intervention in the private sector have slowed the growth in wealth creation.
“China has certainly slowed a lot due to these elements and the U.S. has benefited,” he said.
The
shift from China to the U.S. is also reflected in wealth migration
patterns. A net 13,500 Chinese millionaires left China in 2023, marking a
new record. The U.S. had a net inflow of 2,200 millionaires in 2023 and
a projected inflow of 3,500 in 2024, according to the Henley report.
