China Economics

The United States of Mammon

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Most Americans would laugh at the idea of worshipping a golden calf. Then they spend forty years organizing their lives around debt, career advancement, asset accumulation, and the approval of “the economy.” Solomon warned that the borrower becomes servant to the lender. Jesus warned that no one can serve both God and Mammon. The old gods demanded temples, priests, and sacrifices. The modern god simply asks for your time, your attention, your family, your peace, and eventually your identity. The question isn’t whether modern society worships. The question is whether we’ve mistaken our servant for our master.

Hormuz: The Reality TV War and China’s Unfortunate Front-Row Seat

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Modern war has acquired an odd new feature. It now comes with graphics, dramatic music, and a nightly highlight reel. Precision bombs streak across the screen. Drones glide in cinematic slow motion. Social media fills with grainy infrared footage of things exploding in the desert while commentators nod gravely and say phrases like “escalation dynamics” and “rules-based order.”

When Money Becomes a Weapon: China’s Digital Yuan and the Quiet War for Economic Power

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To understand why this matters, you have to strip away the marketing. A CBDC is not “digital cash.” Cash is anonymous, final, and indifferent. A CBDC is programmable, trackable, and conditional. It is issued directly by a central bank, lives on state-controlled rails, and behaves exactly as policy requires it to behave. That makes it extremely attractive to governments that prefer obedience over ambiguity.

Trumping China’s Geopolitical Long Game

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Reciprocal Tariffs Are a Stake in the Heart of the Chinese Export Economy Chinese communist leader Xi Jinping was riding high at the Third Plenary Session of the 20th Chinese Communist Party Central Committee back in July 2024. After all, years of Chinese trade surpluses had funded the largest modernization of the People’s Liberation Army …

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