Eventually, it comes for everyone. They say that the only sure things in life are death and taxes. While true, over the last eleven years we’ve come to depend on another “d”, dollar. Sure, the US economy can decouple, but only for a while. To this point, the eurodollar is undefeated.

There seems to be a lot of surprise about China’s predicament. It’s pretty standard stuff, really. For more than a year all we heard was globally synchronized growth. A recovery had been written about as a foregone worldwide conclusion.

Because of this bias, what’s been going on over there over the last year or so might have appeared far out of place. For an economic system poised for a big rebound, why the political retrenching? The latest bit of naked authoritarianism was described last week by the New York Times
:

China has long made it clear that reporting on politics, civil society and sensitive historical events is forbidden. Increasingly, it wants to keep negative news about the economy under control, too.

A government directive sent to journalists in China on Friday named six economic topics to be “managed,” according to a copy of the order that was reviewed by The New York Times.

Right at the top of the soft censorship list is, “Worse-than-expected data that could show the economy is slowing.” In the West, this is being taken as a sign that Chinese leaders and the Communist government is afraid of what may happen if it turns out to be true.

“It’s possible that the situation is more serious than previously thought or that they want to prevent a panic,” said Zhang Ming, a retired political science professor from Renmin University in Beijing.

I think this is all backwards. “More serious than previously thought” is the insinuation of Western economic expectations. Rather than being surprised by what’s going on in their economy, and therefore the global economy, it seems more likely this is exactly what they have been expecting all along. They’ve been preparing for this kind of slowdown (and worse) for a long time.