re: Chinese Tanks to Protect State-Run Banks: Money Is "Investment Product" No Withdrawals

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No reason electronics, and anything else, can't be made here.

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My general view is that whether we’re talking about labor or housing, restricting supply in order to raise prices is a terrible idea. But prices rising due to strong demand is good. The problem facing Chicago and other midwestern cities is that low demand is not an affordability strategy — it’s a recipe for failure. And the solution, fundamentally, has to come from outside the region.

The only reason that falling relative demand for Chicago is translating into falling absolute demand for Chicago is that overall American population growth has slowed to a crawl as the once-robust flow of immigrants has turned into a trickle and the birthrate has continued to decline. In the longer run, we should be doing much more to support parents and children. But in the shorter term, the country would benefit from significantly more immigration. I’d be thrilled to defer to immigration skeptics about exactly which immigrants we let in and under which terms, but it should be more people. Make them speak English, make them pass some public charge test, make them have college degrees or score over 100 on an IQ test or whatever you want. But it ought to be more people.

Per capita GDP in Illinois is higher than Norway and more than 50 percent higher than Italy, to say nothing of the many countries around the world that are poorer than Italy. Whatever Chicago’s problems, there are billions of people on the planet who could secure superior opportunities in life by gaining permission to live there. And there could be big advantages to the United States in accelerating our population growth rate rather than allowing cities with below-average demand to slip into spirals of decline.

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