Why Economist Ken Rogoff Knows Nothing About the Economy of China.
Harvard Professor, former IMF Chief Economist deliberately gets it wrong: I explain why.
Ken Rogoff says China is trapped: “They keep leaning on financial repression and state-directed investment which only makes their situation worse”.
Ken knows that China's real economy has outgrown America's every year since 1951 and will soon be twice its size1. He also knows that, despite US tariffs and embargoes, China’s GDP will be 5.4%, or $1.8 trillion bigger2 at the end of this year than last.
Why does Ken ignore the data and say silly things?
As has been the case since 1951, all economists, professors, authors and politicians must ignore the data and must predict and explain China’s inevitable doom. No questions asked, deus vult.
Like leaders who stubbornly predict Ukraine’s military victory, Ken and every economist, professor, author and politician ignores the data and says silly things because they’ve been hypernormalized3 into a trance state where the
false/absurd reality of China’s failure has become so inherent that it's accepted as normal, even by the increasing number who know it's not. Hypernormalization is another sign that our collapse is nigh.
Being much closer to it than we are, Ken is aware of the falseness and failure of our government but he like everyone he knows, he charades4 to keep his job. And the overwhelming majority of people in power are like Ken. Their jobs depend on the presence even more than our do.
Meanwhile, let’s look on the bright side, follow Fernand Braudel’s5 advice and imagine a world led by a beneficent superpower, imagine the impact on European civilization of a series of Imperial dynasties maintaining the self-same style and significance from Caesar Augustus until the First World War. Now imagine such a civilization existing on the other side of the planet unaware of Greek philosophy, the alphabet, Roman governance, Christianity, feudalism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment or democracy, but with its own, unique cultural and institutional correlates that exceeded all of them in intellectual subtlety and material success.
21% of US GDP is finance, insurance & real estate. 18% is 'healthcare' and falling life expectancy. 13% is professional & business services. 10% is manufacturing.
5.4% annual ‘growth’ means GDP grows by 5.4% compounded annually (last year, 5.4% amounted to $1.7 trillion). So its $32 trillion GDP grew by 5.4% to $33.7 trillion in 2025 and will grow to an expected $35.4 trillion in 2026.
Alexei Yurchak, described how everyone in the USSR knew the system was failing but no one could imagine an alternative. So the pretense of a functioning society became the accepted reality.
Yes, ‘charade’ can be used as a verb, as you see.
A History of Civilizations. Fernand Braudel
Concise and eloquent and factual, as always, Godfree.
I sense there is a script that connects what most pundits like Rog-off read from. I ponder: who writes the script? Is it possible they control, or are near controlling, the institutions of the west? Is their next goal the entirety of the world?