Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Ian Bremmer on Charlie Rose

I purchased Ian Bremmer's Book "The End of the Free Market" to find just how precarious and in some countries "Over" the free market is. It is sort of like the U.S. and Europe try to still play by Free market rules and it is as if the other countries players are playing by entirely different rules. This is one of the reasons that the U.S. and European and much of the rest of the Free market economies are having such problems.

I recorded Ian Bremmer on Charlie Rose on DVR and watched it this evening. It was on here where I live on PBS around Midnight and then noon today I  believe it was. So I thought I would share what I found useful about this interview.

First of all, Ian Bremmer is the head of the Eurasia Group which (I believe?) is an international investment research company for individual and large scale investors worldwide.

So, what I heard that was of value was that the G-20 or G-19 is not the G-7 or G-8 and has entirely different interests in many cases than the U.S. does. In fact most of the G-20 nations don't agree with U.S. values in regard to Governance, Human rights, or ways of doing business in a free market sort of way. So there really wasn't a lot that Obama could do this time.

However, the real change is that Indonesia, India, South Korea, and Japan, Taiwan and other Asian nations are starting to feel threatened by China in many ways and are turning to the U.S. for their support in this and are upset that the U.S. is going through so much economic turmoil that it might not be able to be there in the way all these nations want who are scared of what China is becoming on the Asian stage.

He also spoke about how all the various kinds of State Capitalism are undermining all the free markets worldwide and creating chaos for all free market nations.

He also spoke about how The U.S. and China as so different in their basic points of view that they are starting to become as different as Israel and the Palestinians in regard to values and what is important to each of them.

This last statement I found disturbing because this sounds ominous not necessarily now but sometime in the future within 5, 10, 20, or 50 years. Of course, I think it is also likely that China will be forced by its people to democratize. However, I'm not sure how a nation with a population of 1,324,655,000 can be effectively governed in a democratic way.  But then we look at India with  1,139,964,932 (both these populations were in 2008) and we have our answer.


But then how does China get from here to there? Only the Chinese can know that!


And the rest of the democratic nations have a motivation to help the Chinese get there (Whenever they are asked by the Chinese) So, the future as we all can see is a work in progress.


But I think everyone on earth in every nation will absolutely agree democracy in China if it ever arrives will look completely different there than in any other nation. The closest to what a Chinese Democracy will look like is Taiwan and India. This is my best guess right now.

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