Thoughts 23 Jan 2007 12:51 pm
China and Money
A friend mentioned that he had read an article in one of the asian newspapers, that said the chinese were coming here with suitcases full of money to invest.
I think I found the source of this story on the DOJ website.
According to this two former managers of the Bank of China, their wives, and a relative laundered at least $485 million that belonged to the Bank of China.
The scheme allegedly involved efforts by the bank managers to launder the stolen money through, Hong Kong, Canada and the United States, among other countries, and then immigrate to the United States from China with their wives by obtaining false identities and entering into sham marriages with naturalized U.S. citizens.
Among other places, they used Las Vegas casinos to launder the money.
Since they were apparently planning on moving here, I wouldn’t be suprised if they invested some of that money in Las Vegas real estate.
$485 million. Now that’s a lot of suitcases.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the Chinese government has allowed Marsh & McLennan’s insurance-brokerage unit to become the first foreign company to obtain a license to operate a wholly owned venture in China, in a sign of how Beijing is following through on pledges to allow strong competitors into parts of its financial sector.
According to an article in Reuters the Las Vegas Sands Corp, seems to have gotten near final approval to build it’s resort on Hengqin Island near Macau, where they already have a resort.
It said the Zhuhai government had established a “Project Coordination Committee specifically related to the company’s proposed development of The Venetian Hengqin International Convention and Resort Project in Zhuhai.”
Wal-mart is increasing the number of stores in China from 66 to 90.
Here’s an article in Newsweek International on the way they do business there.
In Dalian, a coastal town in northeastern China, Wal-Mart (WMT ) has a multilevel underground store beneath a soccer field named Olympic Square. The local tourism bureau has designated the store as a tourist destination.
Walmart as a tourist destination?? God, I hope I never get that bored.
Just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, a man I knew took a train trip from Poland, across the USSR, and down through China to Hong Kong.
This trip showed him a couple of important things.
The first is: Buy your vodka in Poland and buy lots of it, as everyone you meet will want to help you drink it, and the farther east you go, the more expensive and worse tasting it gets.
The second is: In China, the farmers had a wheat quota to meet and any extra they got to keep, in the USSR they still used the old communist sytem. In the USSR the wheat was laying over in the fields and right across the border in China the second crop was planted and up.
Previously, Beijing had allowed foreign retailers to open stores in China, but only if they had sales of more than $2 billion.
That group included only Wal-Mart, Carrefour of France and the Metro Group of Germany.
Last week Beijing opened the door to smaller players, like Marsh & McLennan, and lifted rules that had confined the three giants to a limited number of cities and forced them to work with Chinese partners.
From the outside looking in, I’d say China has figured out that the Hong Kong model isn’t half bad. They can keep the government as is, and as long as they allow a bit of free enterprise everybody makes money, including the government and this new found wealth draws the mega-corps.
Time to stop and smell the roses. If things don’t change, china will completely overshadow us as the world’s economic super power, which means they win the war without firing a shot.
In the mean time, our government will continue to support companys like Walmart and will continue to see nothing wrong with our being a debtor nation.
Why is it, everytime I hear some government backed economist speak, I feel like I’m watching a very badly written episode of Pinky and the Brain?