Exercise in Applied Insanity

"What we all know is that the bulk of the so-called "recycled" material has been loaded on slow boats to China, where it has been "reprocessed" under appalling conditions, recorded many times. But as long as local authorities could get the waste off their books, honour was satisfied and quotas were deemed filled.

Now, with the Chinese economy going into freefall and manufacturers going bankrupt in droves, cheap Chinese goods are no longer pouring into the UK, so there are no empty ships to take our rubbish as ballast for the return journey."

"The majority of this happened because of changes in regulations last year deliberately decided by the Chinese government in order to slow down the economy and to move away from reprocessing [and those] labor intensive, environmentally unfriendly and energy-intensive kind of companies," Seyedin says. "And certainly some companies have suffered as a result of that. Those types of companies needed to go anyway."

But with unemployed workers crowding the local labor exchange, some economists fear the government was too aggressive in forcing change. State-run newspapers say 20 million Chinese workers have lost their jobs in the first half of this year. China's Communist Party has based its legitimacy on the promise of economic prosperity and rising living standards. It has kept those promises for three decades, but the perfect storm created by its own reforms and the financial turmoil overseas could mean trouble ahead.

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One of the higher ticket items was planned to be automobiles. If you think our domestic automobile industry has a problem now, imagine Chinese cars with a tenth of the labor costs of American ones.

when they admit that growth is slowing from the blistering 11% they saw in 2007 to a more modest 5.8% predicted for the fourth quarter of 2008

It's worse than it sounds. All the stats I've seen indicate that in order to provide for their own population growth & demand for new domestic jobs, China has to maintain at least an 8% annual growth rate to avoid economic contraction. If even the notoriously rosy pronouncements of the Chinese gov't are allowing for a dip below that level, the reality may be far worse...