Even if they do not like to say so in public, worries about Mr Xi and Taiwan prevent them from embracing China. This indicates a certain trepidation among Wall Street’s finest. While stocks are up and some evidence shows modest inflows to mutual funds, Bloomberg data suggest continued outflows from exchange-traded funds so far this year. The real-time evidence on flows is mixed. They are only published with a lag: the latest figures do not capture reopening. These showed growing “portfolio flows”, such as investments in stocks or debt securities, into China in recent years, before turning sharply negative in 2022. The most comprehensive information on foreign investment is found in balance-of-payments data, which track financial and trade flows. Berkshire Hathaway reduced its stakes in byd, a Chinese electric-vehicle manufacturer, and tsmc, a strategically important Taiwanese semiconductor firm, in the last quarter of 2022. The boss of a private-equity fund says that, although their firm still sees opportunities in China, it is tailoring its approach avoiding any businesses that could end up ensnared in, say, nasty supply-chain disputes. In private, however, financiers are more cautious, and are cutting back their exposure to the country. In contrast, analysts at JPMorgan Chase, a bank, and Jeff Gundlach, a bond investor, have called China “uninvestible” (although JPMorgan’s analysts later changed their minds). He also downplayed the idea that China might one day invade Taiwan. On February 15th Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway, a conglomerate, who is famously bullish on China, praised local firms as being “better and stronger” than their American equivalents, and available at cheaper prices. There are noisy proponents of both sides of the position. Maybe exposure to the growth juggernaut, adjusted for all of these risks, is worth it. Given its economic heft, a rebound in activity as Chinese people start visiting restaurants, travelling and shopping again means that the country alone could power much of global growth in 20. The country is opening up after years of hair-trigger lockdowns. This has long been true, but not quite to the extent it is now. The prospect of China eventually invading Taiwan, and the West’s readiness to impose sanctions, as illustrated by the measures imposed on Russia, raise the prospect of further economic estrangement between the two powers. This month it shot down an apparent Chinese spy balloon. America has introduced vast subsidies to boost home-grown industry. Upon opening the box, however, there remains only one possibility, and the cat's state becomes set.Relations between China and the West continue to sour. As long as we can't see inside the box, the cat is simultaneously both alive and dead. Simplified, it goes like this: A cat is in a box along with some kind of poison, and the animal could be alive or dead. Schrödinger's cat is the thought experiment many physicists use to illustrate this concept. In his book, Carroll explains that although we can't predict the behavior of subatomic particles, once researchers go to measure that behavior, the act of measuring causes the set of probabilities about whether and when particles will split to collapse down to only one. Those decaying events can't be predicted with certainty the best we can do (so far at least) is calculate probabilities about the chances certain atoms have of decaying, and when. These tiny particles don't follow those orderly cause-and-effect rules that govern the world we can see instead, subatomic particles are constantly and spontaneously decaying into many other particles. So according to astrophysicist Sean Carroll, author of the new book "Something Deeply Hidden," people who want to find true randomness should look to quantum mechanics, which governs the nanoscopic universe of photons, electrons, and other particles smaller than atoms.
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