The Rand strengthen from $1 - R17,10 two months ago to $1 - R13,75. The reason is the total bugger-up Biden is making by spending and printing money the US has not got . Biden with this start reminds me of the late unlamented Robert Mugabe's economy work. At this rate we should have a rate of $1 - R1 by the end of th9is year, .
SB
"Once things pick up again" - will it? As king as countries like the USA continue to spend money they do not have it will not pick up. In the USA the present tag is - let the money printing presses roll. Soon there would be huge tax increases on the rich and the result will be that small and medium business enter[roses will go bust and millions of jobs lost = whole the poor will pay more for consumer goods. Obviously things look bright for Mr Inflation.
‘They only lost 2 destroyers’, but they also lost 2 frigates. A very similar class of vessel, so much so that the terms are often used interchangeably:
Frigates and destroyers are two of the most common warships in a navy’s fleet. Both are designed for quick manoeuvrability and can be used to escort and protect larger vessels from air, surface and underwater threats. The similarities between frigates and destroyers have led to some European navies using the terms interchangeably.
......
I served at sea on a frigate by the way. Have you even seen one? They are fast, maneuverable ships, just like Destroyers.
‘Destroyers are not carriers’.....right, carriers are bigger and easier to hit. The Japanese lost their carrier deterrent in one battle....Midway. Carriers these days are the equivalent of pre WW2 battleships....great for police actions, but you wouldn’t want to risk them in a battle 100 miles off the coast of China, where the number of missiles targeting them would be unlimited by any possible retaliation, short of nuclear bombs.
Naive, pie in the sky stuff Anger.
Shark,
The reason the 3rd world does better in recessions is largely due to inherently more prudent lending and credit systems.
1st world banks hit sixes all day, and when the ball starts to swing they struggle to adapt. 3rd world banks are used to dealing in singles, so when conditions change they don't have to alter their strategies much/at all.
Moz would you stop embarrassing yourself. First you call fleet carriers vulnerable and cite the Falklands war, where no carriers where even damaged. Then you move the goalposts to another class of ship. Fair enough the term frigate and destroyer are sometimes used interchangeably though you still had the wrong number, it was 4 instead of 3. However of the 4 ships sunk, only one of them was to missiles, the other 3 where sunk by unguided bombs. Now you could try to say being destroyed by unguided bombs proves any class of ship are very vulnerable but that's vulnerability has been around since people first decided to strap bombs on planes and go after ships, and while every navy came to realize the threat of air power to naval assets non of them concluded that it rendered the use of navies obsolete. The Chinese airforce would find it rather hard to get anywhere near an American fleet to drop unguided bombs on it.
The British won the Falkland war, how you can point to Falkands war and not see it as anything other than a endorsement of naval power is beyond me. Without the carriers the British would never have succeeded. Yes the Argentinians where able to do some damage to the British task force but not enough to stop the British from successfully completing their objectives. They couldn't even find the British carriers. Yes Exocet missiles sank one destroyer and damage other warships, but most damage inflicted on the British ships was done by unguided bombs. A series of human and technical errors contributed to the loss of the destroyer sunk by an Exocet.
Destroyers are not carriers’.....right, carriers are bigger and easier to hit
And due to their greater size and mass, also harder to sink.
"The Japanese lost their carrier deterrent in one battle....Midway."
OMG faceplam, the Kido Butai was a deterrent was it?, that's a new one on me and military historians. You have a very strange definition of deterrent. The Japanese carrier force was a mobile strike force that was used aggressively in preemptive strikes and raids on Allied targets and on occasion to support naval landings. Japanese doctrine was to use its carriers and submarines to whittle down the numerically superior American navy enough to allow for a decisive battle to fought between the smaller but in their own view technically superior and better trained surface fleet and the American surface fleet. At no point did the Japanese ever think their carriers would deter America from attacking them. But go on then, lets see you jump through the hoops of trying to redefine the term deterrent.
Secondly not all the Japanese carriers where lost at Midway. They had lost one small carrier and had another fleet carrier damaged, as well as second fleet carrier losing most of its air component (and therefore critically neither where available for Midway) before Midway at the Battle of the Coral Sea. But after Midway they still had another 6 carriers. Overall Midway change the situation for the American navy from one where Japan was dominate to a position of rough parity between the two sides.
Thirdly the Japanese carriers had structural weaknesses that made them more vulnerable to damage than American carriers. In addition Japanese carriers and naval ships in general in WW2 had comparable weak anti air defenses with its 20mm anti aircraft guns being considered rather ineffective for its time. This was in addition to the Japanese having relatively poor damage control systems in place on their ships.
Fourth, they where sunk by planes from American aircraft carriers. You can't just say carriers are vulnerable and not acknowledge the striking power of their air component at the same time.
..great for police actions, but you wouldn’t want to risk them in a battle 100 miles off the coast of China
So basically America has not lost a naval asset at sea since WW2 to enemy air or missile attack ( had one damaged by Israel in what was effectively a friendly fire incident). But you somehow think you know that carriers are now too vulnerable to things like missiles by pointing at a successful naval operation in which no carriers where even damaged and Midway a battle that took place 79 years ago that ushered in the era of the aircraft carrier. Forgive me for saying this but I think the American military/navy knows a little more than you with your superficial bullet point knowledge of military history. They are not idiots, they wouldn't be pumping lots of money into new aircraft carriers if they thought the risks outweighed the benefits. The American's no doubt have the best early warning and anti missile defense capabilities in the world. The carriers themselves would be actually hundreds of miles further to the east of Taiwan such is the range of their strike aircraft. The risks to America carriers back in WW2 where likely considerable greater than today as back then they faced an enemy which in naval terms for a while was its superior but that didn't stop the American's from risking them in battle, unless you suddenly think the American navy have become cowards, something I very much doubt.
There is no doubt the Chinese could inflict some damage on the American naval and air power but their is no way they could stop the American's from destroying its own naval assets and winning air supremacy over Taiwan. Taiwan of course being home to airbases the Chinese can't actually sink either.
I believe Taiwan has 165,000 standing troops in its armed forces with a reserve of 1.6 million. The Americans have another 30,000 stationed there. The force the Chinese would need to overcome that would need to be considerable larger, and the build up of force as I said would take time and would be observed in advance giving time for Taiwan to mobilize its own reserve and for America to bring in reinforcements. Any invasion would be a protracted affair that would require a securing and sustaining sea and air supply lines from China to Taiwan but looking at the balance of force, the Chinese have no realistic prospect of achieving that.
There's radar data, that has come out over the last days, which may entirely shift the goalposts as far as discussion concerning the effectiveness of military hardware being talked about here.
Just saying.
STav
There was a US warship badly damaged and 15 people lost their lives in Yemen about 5 or 6 years ago. You probably did not hear about that one.
The fact is that China will attack Taiwan - the question is when? That will happen when the US withdraw its troops from that island - and we will have to see when Biden instructs the army to withdraw from Taiwan, leaving a nominal order force in Taiwan with instructions like Obama gave not to get involved with fighting at all. - which let to the successes achieved by ISIS Wait and see - probably within the next six months - the attacks will take place.
You miss the essential point Anger in a morass of irrelevant Google acquired detail. The Chinese will not have to deploy their carriers.....Taiwan and any fleet defending it can be attacked by missiles from the Chinese mainland. And a full scale missile attack from the mainland and smaller missile carriers will be very hard too stop.
Carriers have many strategic advantages.. defending Taiwan from China is not one of them.
The point of the Falklands analogy is the vulnerability of naval vessels to missiles....that risk has increased substantially since then. A conventional war 100 miles off. The Chinese coast is a recipe for potential disaster. US military leaders are smart enough to know that,
Not missing any point and I actually knew the Midway stuff without looking it up because I've an interest in WW2 and have looked into a lot. I also remember hearing before about human error and technical failures playing a part in the loss of the British destroyer in the Falklands. But nothing wrong with looking stuff up rather than just spouting nonsense and trying to appear like an authority on topics I'm not overly experienced with, something you frequently do. I just love the way you never acknowledge you errors either.
The whole point of attacking Taiwan is too actually take control of of it, to do that would have to actually get a whole lot of troops on the ground and the primary means of doing so would be by sea and that would require a lot of naval assets to do so. If you think the Chinese can simply drop a couple of hundred thousands troops by air and keep them supplied by air your dreaming. Nor can you drop tanks and heavy equipment by air. The big stuff would have to come by sea.
Absolutely they could attack Taiwan with missiles to try soften it up before invading, but they would still have to invade.
Your Falklands analogy holds even less water when your now talking about land based anti shipping missiles. There is no examples in history of land based missiles hitting ships at the ranges American carriers can send out strike aircraft from these days. Absolutely missile technology is no doubt getting better and I'm sure many countries have capable anti shipping missiles, but most known about anti shipping missiles have limited ranges of less than 100km. Anti missile technology is also getting better, take Israel's American made Iron Dome missile defense shooting down most of the rockets Hamas fires into Israel. No doubt China would have far more sophisticated missiles than Hamas, but the American's would have far longer warning time to track and intercept them. Do the Chinese have the capability to track America ships 600+ miles away at sea, be able to determine which ships are the actually carriers, target them with missiles and get them through the American missile defense system which is no doubt the most sophisticated in the world and then hit a moving target. Maybe they do but its very unlikely and their is certainly no way you could know that. Maybe the Chinese have developed something in secret but they would want to have an awful lot of confidence to rely on an untested and unproven weapons system. I'm not even sure if America has that sort of capability.
As for smaller missile carrier, LOL, I'd imagine the US Navy would be licking its lips at the thoughts of obliterating anything the Chinese send within a few 100 miles of them..
But on land based anti shipping missiles, I'm sure America also has a few capable land based anti shipping missiles and I'd imagine they already are on Taiwan. So again, the Chinese would have to be awfully confident they can find and take those out if they want to send ships over to take Taiwan. They Chinese would also need someway of dealing with American submarines.
You have to admit the risk would be far more on the Chinese side if they attacked. The US spends the most on its military, probably twice that of China and has done so communist China has existed From a technological point the hardware the America military can field is unparalleled. They are also the most experienced when it comes to military operations. Unless China has some seriously smart people in the field of military R+D who with less money and starting from a lower technology base can overturn the decades long military lead the US has had they would be crazy to pick a fight with them.
And that's assuming no other allied countries backed up America either further tilting the scales against them, which is also pretty unlikely. Most of the worlds other relatively big spenders on their military are allied to America. Even if no one else backed up Taiwan and American in the fighting, pretty certain most of the rest of the world would simply stop trading with China and slap a whole host of sanction on it, putting pay to China's intentions of becoming the world biggest economy by 2035.
I'm not saying China is not a threat. But at the same time American's can frequently go overboard and exaggerate threats. There is a reality, a balance of power and China is at this moment in time not America's equal. They are smart enough to know that.
Couple of options here...but ultimately, somebody has technology that would render ACCs, destroyers, ICBMs and even the Aurora useless.
What has been happening, supposedly on quite a few recorded occasions, is that one object will sit above the vessel while others swarm it. Apparently, anti drone technology has been completely unsuccessful in countering whatever this is.
Having breezed through the posts I must say that Stavass is a complete clown . Rooitwit as always has no clue. Sharktwit does better than usual.
Congrats to Mike who really gets it, Plum , Draad and Moz also.
One could go on all day correcting the garbage posted by nutters here.
One thing - China had a trade surplus of 500 billon a year with the USA and their theft of intellectual property was estimated at around 600 billion a year.
The Chinese placed tarrifs on US goods and had internal barriers to the purchase of US goods.
By the time President Trump had done with China he had them over the proverbial barrel.
The CCP Demonrats are in bed with the Chinese as are the Uniparty Rinos.
Ditto the Globalist ruled European Union. These scumbags thought th USA must pay for their defence. Meanwhile Germany was importing oli from Russia and not paying their defence dues. Horror of Horrors President Trump called them out!
That same Germany had a10% tariff on US cars and the US had only a 2.5% tariffs. All Trump wanted to do was level the playing fields. Prior anti American Globalist Presidents like Obummer, Bushes, Clintons etc had sold out America.
To the Globalist mind nothing was worse than America First and MAGA. After all their plan is to bring America to its knees. End American Sovereignty.
I am happy to report that there is a tremendous fightback going on regarding the massive election fraud that put China Joe into power. Secondly, the many lies about Covid are coming out thick and fast. Fauci is finished.
There is going to be hell to pay for all this.
Globalists are tring to import their ally China's credit score system into America and the West generally.
Anybody thinking teh Chinese system works for the Chinese people is very wrong.
This meme says it all: