Sunday, February 12, 2017

Ma on "money!"


Ma must be a pure code guy... never trained in systems.





17 comments:

Noah Way said...

Translation: America didn't invest in its own people. He has a far better idea of how such 'systems' work than those in charge here.

Matt Franko said...

Well he is apparently ignorant of his own disgraced zombie nation's hoarding of over $1T of "money!" that is for sure... and the resultant systemic effects...

Greg said...

But isnt it just a fact that in the current currency "system" that the Chinese need $1T of US Dollars "hoarded " in order to maintain the peg? They understand that. They arent acting like they are our banker and lending us $1T, leave that to the American stooges to play that trope, but they do want a certain price level for their exports..... as do we.

Seems to me the Chinese are systems people from top to bottom. Americans are more anti system and wish for freedom form a system. I think your charges are misplaced Matt.

I agree with Noah

Matt Franko said...

They dont need USD...

To maintain the peg, they issue CNY at 7 CNY to 1 USD to their "firms" so-called that accrue USD balances in conduct of "trade" so-called...

"but they do want a certain price level for their exports"

Yeah and its as low as any USD payer can afford.... they are dumping all the time...

They are disgraced USD zombie ghouls...

Their military would parachute in grass cutters for $10 per lawn if we would let them....

Tom Hickey said...

But isnt it just a fact that in the current currency "system" that the Chinese need $1T of US Dollars "hoarded " in order to maintain the peg? They understand that. They arent acting like they are our banker and lending us $1T, leave that to the American stooges to play that trope, but they do want a certain price level for their exports..... as do we.

As JW Mason has pointed out, the choice is float and impose effective capital controls, or else peg, and if peg, then keep a big stock of foreign reserves to defend the peg because it will be tested.

Seems to me the Chinese are systems people from top to bottom. Americans are more anti system and wish for freedom form a system.

This is correct. This is the basis of the I Ching and the Chinese classics. They have always viewed society as a social system whose success is subject to the quality of relationships.

Under liberalism, the social system is equated with government and government with restriction on personal freedom. Liberalism was reaction to the medieval dominance of Church and monarchies that began to breakdown with the Protestant Reformation.

China got rid of the old system at the time of the revolution but they retained their preference for a traditionalist social system regarding social relations.

Tom Hickey said...

Ma must be a pure code guy... never trained in systems.

???

Coding is based on systems analysis. This is what it is all about.

Matt Franko said...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_analyst

"Although they may be familiar with a variety of programming languages, operating systems, and computer hardware platforms, they do not normally involve themselves in the actual hardware or software development. "

Ma is a programmer/coder... not a systems analyst...

Probably these days more a politician in search of the almighty buck...

Anonymous said...

A buyer or a seller, a seller or buyer, or maybe both at the same time ;-).

Tom Hickey said...

Jack Ma was not trained as programmer. His background and training is not technical. Almost by accident, he got into the Internet by building web sites as web designer as a way to make some money. Web sites are systems and building them requires systems thinking. Coding is like writing words or doing math but using different kinds of symbols. Logic is the basis of information systems. He could handle simple systems well enough and then later realized that he was onto something. The Internet was taking off and there was nothing in China comparable to the West. Opportunity!

Jack Ma was chiefly an entrepreneur rather than an analyst or coder. He decided to take on Ebay in China and won big owing to his vision, persuasiveness, leadership and management skills.

Ali Baba is a huge system. It is safe to say that Jack Ma actually coded little if any of it, and I know of no evidence that he could even write the code.

At a conference in 2010, Ma revealed that he has never actually written a line of code nor made one sale to a customer. He acquired a computer for the first time at the age of 33.[11]Wikipedia

Ma had the idea of creating a system based on what was out there, knew how to get it done as an entrepreneur, and was able to secure the funding to hire the technical people for the job. For web dev in his day, he would have been writing HTML if he was doing it himself, which only involves very simple coding but not actually programming in the sense it is usually used. Ma is not a coder or even a systems analyst properly speaking, but more properly a systems designer. He had to tell those he hired how he wanted the site to work. They would have developed the system logic and written the code for it.

In the design stage a web site is basically a site map, and that is a system diagram. Each page is a "stock" and the links are "flows." Web sites can be simple one page affairs or highly complicated like Ali Baba and Ebay. The coding creates script for the logical shell that holds the content. It can be thought of in terms of a network of branching conditionals, along with positioning content spaces on a page for viewing and interaction, e.g., ordering.

What the visitor sees is a logical system that carries particular content. They "feel" the logic the system design through ease of navigation and user-freindliness. This is a reason Amazon's "one click" was such a big deal and they patented the design. From the POV of systems design these huge systems are awesome. It all works seamlessly, almost always without flaw or waiting to load.

Obviously, this is not something that Jeff Bezos or Jack Ma do themselves. Ma hired coders and content people for this, and worked with technical people at the top of the chain, but he is not a techie himself. He was actually poor at math in school. Where he excelled was as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are systems people par excellence. They have to wear many hats and juggle many knives simultaneously while maintaining the big picture while always expanding the vision to stay ahead of the curve. But what makes an entrepreneur different is the drive. Ma was driven to succeed.

And the great thing about Jack Ma is that he reputedly remains a really nice guy.

According to Ma and his assistant, Ma had been studying and practicing Chen-style Tai Chi Chuan, a Chinese martial arts form, in Hangzhou for some time when in 2009 he began studying with Wáng Xī'an, a well-known martial arts master and teacher. In 2011, Ma hired several tournament-winning Tai Chi players to teach at Alibaba. Wang, Jet Li, and Ma teach regular classes at Alibaba, at which attendance by employees is mandatory. Ma's vision, according to his assistant, is that one day people will remember him above all as a Tai Chi master, rather than solely as the founder of China's largest internet company and online shopping website.[36] — Wikipedia (link above)

Peter Pan said...

Money ~ resources

Why does he look like a pug?

Unknown said...

China isn't doing such a great job at income redistribution either. France appears to be doing the best.

Quote

Income group, per-adult and before tax China USA France
Total cumulated real growth between 1978 and 2015
China USA France
Full population 811% 59% 39%
Bottom 50% 401% -1% 39%
Middle 40% 779% 42% 35%
Top 10% 1294% 115% 44%

Tom Hickey said...

China isn't doing such a great job at income redistribution either. France appears to be doing the best.

China's challenge now is to avoid the middle income trap as a developing country and successfully navigate the Lewis turning point.

It's premature to compare China with developed countries on distribution. The leadership says they are aware of this challenge and are working on it in this 5-year plan. China needs to get growth at the bottom. Difficult with a large peasant population.

John said...

Tom: "...or else peg, and if peg, then keep a big stock of foreign reserves to defend the peg because it will be tested."

Doesn't their huge foreign reserves make any testing just a pointless exercise? Just like the hedge funds who line up t throw money away on shorting JGBs, I suppose there'll be no end of dummies who'll line up to flush their money down the toilet by testing China's resolve to hold a peg that they can defend till kingdom come.

China will defend the peg because it is in its interests to do so, or at least in the developmental model they have been following for decades. That is why it is a fallacious argument to start from the premise that China are "stupid" or, as Matt and others claim, "dollar zombies". Well, that may be, but it doesn't explain their rationale. China will continue the peg until it is developmentally redundant or politically dangerous. Without decades of international trade on Washington consensus terms, China would almost certainly not have the economy it has today.

Tom Hickey said...

Yeah, they publicly dared Soros to come after them saying they'd bury him.

Peter Pan said...

China intends to be less reliant upon exports to drive its economy. Donald Trump is signaling that they are indeed heading in the right direction, and perhaps should make haste.

NeilW said...

"They dont need USD"

They don't, but at the same time they do.

If you have USD on the Asset side of the balance sheet, you can discount it with Yuan and the balance sheet still looks good to a neo-liberal.

That's the trick all the net exporters have been using.

Serge_Tomiko said...

The Triffin dilemma applies. The world is transitioning to the Bancor, with the IMF SDR being an interim unit of account.

In time, no national currencies will be reserve currencies.