Saturday, May 26, 2012

$180 billion?

The Economist (May.26/2012) magazine publishes that about 18’000 officials had fled the country[China] between 1995 and 2008 with stolen assets totaling 800 billion yuan ($130 billion at today’s exchange rate). But on Fareed Zakaria show(April, 29/2012), Evan Osnos said:
“Last year, there was a report that went up from the Chinese Central Bank, just for a few hours, on the Internet, before it was taken down which suggests that they never meant to release it. And what is said was that there was $180 billion that had been -- $180 billion with a "b" U.S. dollars that had gone from Chinese Treasury, from, essentially, public money that had been taken overseas by corrupt officials. When that happened at the time, frankly, a lot of us thought this can't be right. The decimal place is off, something's off. What we're now starting to think is that, in fact, it's plausible, that if there are enough Bo Xilais in the system, enough people who have assembled these economic empires for themselves that quantity of money begins to be plausible. And what that means is a certain level of chaos beneath the surface of -- you know, what we see on the surface is the ritual of everybody banding together, the system doing well.”
So I think so far about $130-$180 billion fled the country at least. That's about the sum of 20 years of Mongolian GDP...

Pure awesomeness!

The photos of menu were taken by Mr.Lhagva who posted them on his facebook album. Good photos bro! Other photos were taken mostly from http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/
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