Bai Lan – Tang Ping

Mandarin Chinese for Let It Rot – Lie Flat

Boomers in the US have workplace stories to tell about newly hired Millennials losing interest at their job after just a few months. Many ad hoc committee groups or emergency overtime requests at work go unheeded by younger employees as if there is no expectation or requirement to do anything extra at work. To my surprise, this attitude is found in China–where social mobility is already an entrenched problem since the early 2000’s. The burden of three mountains, an uprising on May 4, and “a smaller slice of cake,” are all thought symbols of a beautiful calligraphy that is used in Chinese writing–but point to the difficulty of achieving in education, healthcare, and housing–in the world’s second largest economy. A sort of fatalism has been building in China, just as in the US–of a shoulder shrug of–“If it Doesn’t Work Out–Then it Won’t Matter.” Bai Lan is a term for being a slacker, such that a first response to do extra work is to immediately say, “Let someone else do it,” or “Ask me tomorrow.”

To be sure, this following chart says a lot about the carrot being removed as a treat to get to some goalpost. A drop in the working age demographics is found both in the US and China, and is described in Raoul Pal’s February 10, 2020 YouTube share on Real Vision with link in the caption box below:

In his timely and acclaimed centerpiece for Real Vision, Raoul quantifies why Bai Lan may be an entropy coming into the massive work machine within China, and as the US service trade industry becomes an outlier of job growth. In the US–as manufacturing has left the country–any trade other than finance–is creating a debt leverage of refinance instead of actual production of goods and trade like infrastructure maintenance, construction, trucking and wholesale. Here’s another interesting graph below:

Here we see a dwindling workforce participation keeping unemployment figures low, and a huge Fed balance sheet mirroring labor participation with free easy money keeping zombie companies alive and well for decades. A rise in interest rates with a shrinking balance sheet should get rid of all the alt-coin BS and companies unable to turn a profit by burning through cheap cash.

Finally, here are three more graphs about boomer retirement in the US and housing with a final destination!

To be sure, the best (and only) place to still buy a house for under $200,000 is in–drumroll please–Dayton, OH! The area surrounding Pittsburg, Akron, Canton, Buffalo, NY and NY cities along the Erie Canal–read Rochester–are the last rust belt towns where housing payments resemble anything close to a boomer’s generational memory.

So don’t sweat the small stuff.