Yesterday, Mark DeWeaver did an interview with U.S. News & World Reports regarding his recently published book on China: Animal Spirits with Chinese Characteristics.
Below is the interview:
Also viewable at Google Hangout.
I previously interviewed Mark for TLS and reviewed Animal Spirits for TLS.
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After six-months of interviews with over 40 experts and businesspeople. After plowing through more than 1,200 citations to find hard data and statistics. After hundreds of conversations, rebuttals and comments — my first book is finished.
Great Wall of Numbers: Business Opportunities & Challenges in China is neither a bullish or bearish take on the mainland. I try to be even-handed and I do not wear rose-tinted glasses. In some chapters at the beginning like food & beverage or luxury goods, it seems like the sky is the limit. In others towards the end (17, 19 & 20) the overall findings are quite sobering, yet even among these hurdles (e.g., debt, regulations, rent-seeking) there are investment and business opportunities for those willing to take the risks.
And it is free. You can read the entire book online permanently here or grab a Kindle edition from Amazon here.
This guide is up-to-date as of last week and does not contain any of the hype or hyperbole that is part and parcel to the investment literature market. No get-rich-quick schemes or instant-millionaire lingo or gobbledygook. In fact, as I mention repeatedly throughout, if you want to do business in any domicile you should do your own due diligence, consult with an experienced lawyer and perform a SWOT analysis. Only fools rush in.
For doomers and apocaholics: there are any number of problems that China may be facing in the future (as I have noted in detail last year), but this is not to say that it will collapse or that there are no longer growth opportunities for entrepreneurs. If you think the sky is always falling and it never does, you are actively participating in the self-defeating Prepper’s wager.
If you want to diversify to a new customer base, there is no need to subscribe to any gimmicky newsletter or perpetually-wrong financial prophet: check-out GWON por gratis and partake in the Entrepreneur’s wager. Jiayou!
Note: TLS readers may be interested in Chapter 7 which includes an interview Stephan Kinsella (a regular TLS contributor), Chapter 13 which includes an interview David Veksler (who was previously interviewed here on TLS) and Chapter 20 which includes an interview with Mark Thornton (who was previously interviewed here on TLS).
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It must be for some. And one man, 63-year-old Jose Santiago Delao of Texas, was willing to provide dental services on the cheap, despite not having a license. Eventually he landed on the authorities’ radar and was arrested following a complaint from a woman about a botched molar repair:
Delao admits he skirted the law, but isn’t remorseful.
“Jesus Christ didn’t need or didn’t have a license,” Jose Delao told Yahoo News during a jailhouse interview. “People hurt and they needed it. People didn’t have enough money to visit the regular dentist.”
Delao, a former dental lab technician, claims he couldn’t turn his back.
“It broke my heart,” he said, tapping his chest, “because I have the experience.”
But authorities say Delao, a native of Costa Rica, has never been a licensed dentist in Texas. If convicted, he could get two to 10 years in prison….
A survey of published news reports shows that as many as eight such underground dental clinics have been shutdown in the U.S. since last summer.
“I would clearly classify it as a problem,” said Dr. Frank Catalanotto, chair of the Department of Community Dentistry at the University of Florida. “It is potentially a big problem.”
I disagree that the problem is unlicensed dentistry. The problem is that there is obviously a market demand for low-cost dentistry that isn’t being met, probably because the barrier to entry in the field as a state-licensed dentist is so high, a barrier which licensed dentists have a vested interest in maintaining, as it protects their market share from would-be competitors like Delao. But people are far more likely to be uninsured for dental care than for medical care, or simply can’t afford to pay the high prices of mainstream dental work. Delao understood this and tried to meet the need, to his credit. He may have committed some crime (if, as the story reports, he did not let a patient leave when she wanted to), but trying to help people isn’t one of them.
(Cross-posted from A Thousand Cuts.)
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Even with substantial help from the government in the form of $7,500 buyer’s tax credits, automakers are having trouble moving their electric vehicles:
Ford Motor Co. is offering hefty discounts of more than $10,000 for leases on its slow-selling Focus electric vehicle.
Ford is offering customers up to $10,750 off for three-year leases, according to the Dearborn automaker’s website. It also has dropped the base price of the Focus EV by $2,000 for cash sales.
In addition, Ford is offering a $2,000 cash discount on the Focus EV and 1.9 percent financing if the electric vehicle is purchased through Ford Motor Credit.
The automaker sold just 685 Focus EVs in 2012, but built 1,627 — making it one of the poorest performers among electric vehicles on the market.
This follows reports that Nissan has dropped the base price of its Leaf EV by 18 percent, following sluggish sales in 2012 that didn’t come close to meeting projections. And the plug-in hybrid Chevy Volt continues to struggle, although it saw an uptick in sales late last year. But Government Motors still loses thousands of dollars on every Volt it sells.
Despite these grim numbers, some forecasters predict robust sales for EVs in 2013. But President Obama’s promise to have one million electric cars on the road by 2015 still seems to be a long shot. The choices made by consumers are speaking much louder than Obama’s words ever could.
(Cross-posted from A Thousand Cuts.)
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There are certain books in life that upon reading them you think to yourself “I feel not only smarter but this is exactly the book I would like to have written.”
And that is in summation what Animal Spirits with Chinese Characteristics embodies. It is written by nine-year China veteran Mark DeWeaver, now the hedge fund manager of Quantrarian Capital Management in Washington DC. In addition to having worked as a broker and financial analyst in Guangdong (the most populous province on the mainland) and Hong Kong, DeWeaver received his PhD in economics from the University of Hawaii. The title alludes to the ‘animal spirits’ invoked seventy-five years ago by John Maynard Keynes to describe how emotions influence human behaviors. The other part of the title comes from Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” (改革开放) liberalization process that began in 1978 – what Deng called “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
One of the shortcomings of many China-related non-fiction books today is that they generally try to discuss something that is impossible to penetrate: how and why the Standing Committee makes decisions. Volumes have been and will continue to be written about the purported inner workings of Zhongnanhai (中南海), the Party headquarters in Beijing, yet this amounts to little more than the modern-day equivalent of Kremlinology. Or as the popular and fitting English expression germanely (sic) describes this seemingly futile divination activity: trying to read the tea leaves in China (tasseography). [Keep reading…]
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