Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon visit China to bolster business relations
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Okay, the latest hot button word being used when it comes to China, US relations is decoupling. Should the United States and China decouple? It almost sounds like a reality television show for crying out loud. First and foremost, issues in regards to China, but again, perspective is necessary.
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Just recently we had the story about the Chinese warplane buzzing one of our spy planes and our spy planes fly really close to the Chinese border. It’s all legal what we’re doing. We’ve always done it. Everybody does it to us. Everybody spies on everybody, right? Anyway, buzzed our plane, got video of it. It’s all over the news. Again, this has happened before.
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The only time, I’m not kidding, the only time my website got hacked. My only time my website got hacked was right after, if you do remember, it’s the early stages of the Bush administration, a Chinese plane flew close to one of our spy planes, an AWACS plane, clipped it, crashed. I think the pilot died. Our plane was going down. We had to throw out all of the sensitive information off it. And it was a bit of a blowback.
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and get a bit of a foreign policy crisis for George W. Bush early on in his administration. And yeah, the Chinese hackers started hacking all these firms. This is like 2000, 2001. I can’t remember exactly. But anyway, neither here nor there. All right. It has happened before it continues to happen. Again, the news media likes to blow this all up. We also have stories all over about how the Chinese government is raiding the offices of Bain Capital.
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and this company and that company. And this is real. I mean, we’ve talked about this for a very long time with technology transfers and what the Chinese government forces companies to do if they want to do business in China. And I’ve always said, well, if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. But many of these companies here in the United States decide, hey, you know what, we want that market. We want that market. So guess what?
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will share the technology. Chinese have done an unbelievable job of copying our stuff for a very long period of time. A lot of it as well, we’ve given away. You go back to the Clinton administration, back when the LaRouse Space Corporation, giving away all of this missile technology. They advanced decades in a very short period of time because of, again, technology transfers, politics, and nonsense. Anyway.
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Anyway, there was a story today in the Wall Street Journal talking about how U.S. manufacturers are seeking alternatives as tensions between China continue to rise. And yeah, do I think this is nothing new? We’ve already seen it with not just smaller manufacturers, we’ve seen it with even Apple starting to move some of its supply chain manufacturing capacity, moving it over to India. But many other companies.
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are doing the same thing. What we need to grasp is just the magnitude of China’s manufacturing capabilities, capacity, and how low the costs are there to do business. They do 31% of global manufacturing. 31% of global manufacturing happens in China, 31%. We do 17% of global manufacturing here in the United States. So.
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You’ve got various different companies out there concerned. Many of them, obviously, we just saw saw what happened in Russia. How many companies had to just write down their manufacturing, their investments in Russia after the Ukraine-Russian war? Just taking it on a chin. That’s just a big loss. So you got companies here in the United States that are concerned about this. OK, and again, being smart.
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It’s like having a diversified portfolio for crying out loud. You want to diversify your supply chain. There’s been a lot of discussion in regards to rare earth materials. And the fact that we get an overwhelming majority of these things that go into all of these green technologies that the Biden administration is pushing, we get them from China. Don’t have to, they call them rare earth materials, minerals, if you will, and you can find them everywhere. We have them here in the United States.
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differences we can’t get out of our own way when it comes to mining and getting these things out of the ground. Not to mention, you know, quite frankly, you know, some of the the processes and getting these things out of the ground aren’t exactly clean. So I get it. I do. Again, this is why I call it green technology that is not so green, but that’s a topic for another day. Jamie Dimon. Jamie Dimon is there in, I think it’s in Shanghai. Elon Musk. Most two are not buddies.
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Elon Musk is there as well. He was in Beijing and he’s on his way, I think, to Shanghai. And we’ll do Musk first. Musk is there talking about how he wants to continue to do business and sell Teslas in China. And he didn’t make, it was interesting. And again, nobody’s kind of jumped all over this. He’s talking about increasing his manufacturing there in China, maybe, maybe.
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He obviously has concerns about what’s happening there as well. You also have again, Jamie Dimon talking about, and everybody’s supposed to be saying the same thing. We don’t want to have a decoupling. We don’t want China and the United States, where they called them like conjoined twins, reliant upon each other. And there’s a lot, we said that that’s kind of true about this, we’ve talked about this. It is the reality. Many people don’t like it.
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But it’s the reality. They rely upon us, we rely upon them. Decoupling, pulling apart, whatever it may be. I don’t think that’s, and I know that’s not China’s best interest by any stretch of the imagination. They know as well. They’re not stupid. I do think that Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk are there to kind of say, hey, listen.
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Um, this is the feeling on the ground here in the United States and you’re going to lose a lot of business. You’re going to lose a lot of business unless you start doing things a little bit differently. Now again, I don’t know. I don’t know. I would on with, uh, uh, Maria Bartiromo’s program this morning. Mornings with Maria. I love doing that show. It was a great time. We’re talking about this and I actually took a different take than the entire panel.
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when it comes to this. And, you know, our, is Jamie Dimon, Elon Musk, are they motivated by profit and making money? Absolutely. But oftentimes, oftentimes business is your best form of foreign policy. Again, people start taking a look at their pockets and they say to themselves, you know, what is this gonna cost me?
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And if Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk can go to China and have a, in effect, do a better job than the State Department is doing when it comes to foreign policy, so be it, so be it. I know it’s an old Thomas Friedman quote about, you know, countries with McDonald’s never invading one another.
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I don’t even know if that’s true anymore. I’m sure that there was a McDonald’s in the Ukraine and we know that there was a McDonald’s in Russia. But again, tying countries together via economics, it helps. It helps, it helps solve conflicts. It does. And again, I hope, I can say, I don’t want to break apart from China. Do we have to have a better position when it comes to China?
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Absolutely. To have to cut down on all the technology transfers, absolutely. The tariff nonsense that Trump put forward, that didn’t work at all. It didn’t. Again, I’ve always talked about competing and China’s always been on everybody’s radar. It’s like the boogeyman out there, how big their economy is gonna be and how they’re growing. You had Stephen Ratner worked in the Obama administration, had a piece in New York Times today, he was there and talking about how things are.
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on the ground in China and how they’re going to grow and all of this stuff. And I’m saying to myself, good, okay, good. We want to have competition in the world. Competition breeds excellence. Another story, I was out yesterday, day before, talking about the overtures that China is making in Latin America.
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because we have, and as they said, we’ve neglected Latin America and how they’re working to establish more relationships there. Again, I think that’s quite frankly, the right way to be doing things. So again, decoupling from China. Again, do I think we’re gonna see some diversification? Absolutely. But a pulling apart, no, no. Again, you certainly hope not. Certainly hope not. Not good for the world at all. Watchdog OnWallStreet.com.