Harley-Davidson Street 750 Appears at India Bike Week 2014, gets priced

This thing is aimed at young Asian and European yupsters, not the rich.

Most Asians look at motorcycles as cheap transport for people who can't afford a car or a truck for their business. They pile farm products, even livestock on them and generally abuse the living crap out of them. A bike is not a status symbol. It is a working vehicle. It is anti-status. Some big Chinese cities have even begun to ban motorcycles from their city limits, the prevailing view being that hoards of small motorcycles are a sign of poverty, so party cadre ban them outright. Many Asian nations including China and, last time I checked, the Philippines do not allow motorcycles on limited access divided highways (motorways, freeways, whatever you call them). I always thought it ridiculous that riding from Subic to Manila the nitwits in the Philippine highway authority thought it was unsafe to allow a big bore motorcycle on the North Luzon Expressway, which is a nice clean toll road like any in the US, perferring to relegate motorcycles to jungle back roads littered with tuk-tuks, water buffalo, chickens, women balancing loads on their heads, suicidal cars and big "Victory Liner" busses.

But for young urban dwelling office workers there might be some cachet in a fancy motorcycle with a whiff of the American dream, a step up from a copy of a 250 Honda. We shall see.

harleyhoonigan said:

Now it's india's time to rise.

Somewhere I read that China is now stabilizing and not growing at the crazy rate they once were.

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China's published growth rates were never honest. They measured growth of inputs to production, not output, and as such missed the reduction in growth caused by the many big bankruptcies in their economy. Workers come to work, find the gates to the factory closed and the owners nowhere to be found. The US measures growth in output, not input, which is the more valid measure. Add to the fact that many of the numbers the Chinese tout are outright fabrications by party cadre who want their regions to look good economically so they can get promoted to higher level party positions.

In any event, an undeveloped nation can always grow more rapidly than the leaders as all it has to do is copy what is known to work. But as a nation develops, it always becomes harder to sustain high growth rates.

I would not put either India or China on a pedestal yet. Regardless of what their aggregate GDP might look like, they have hundreds of millions of their citizens living on two dollars a day drinking bad water and not receiving adequate nutrition. They are interesting studies in nations that have both the highest and lowest levels of economic attainment living side by side, often on the same street. Both nations economies are dragged down by breathtaking corruption.

harleyhoonigan said:

I read somewhere that by 2025 a lot of current developing countries will be at a far better state with far less poor people. We'll see some crazy wealth happening in our time. With that will come even more people that can afford bikes like these.

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No surprise there. Just in my life Taiwan and South Korea have lept from backward, empoverished dictatorships to prosperous post industrial societies that elect their leaders.

You will also see some big crashes. China, like the old USSR, will look invincible right up to the week or month it all comes crashing down. That nation has huge economic imbalances that worsen every year, a leadership that is too rigid and unaccountable to initiate the changes the nation needs (like private property rights, a transparent body of laws that protect individual and business property and an honest judiciary) to undo these imbalances. The leadership has too much of their personal money at stake in the status quo and there is no way short of revolution to challenge this. So revolution it will be, and in my lifetime I expect.

Singapore is another place that is unraveling before our eyes. Something big is going to happen there. They are every bit as repressive as China, and increasingly as rigid, but they long ago aligned themselves with the west so they get a pass from the sorts of criticisms leveled at China and North Korea. Still, with a judiciary and public service that is owned by the one and only governing political party, and no chance for a legitimate political opposition, a censored press, stagnating public services and recently a backlash against Chinese immigrants, the little nation state is ripe for an upheaval.

Meanwhile the west is busy peeling Burma (or Myanmar if you must) away from the Chinese and you can expect some economic benefits to accrue to the Burmese to keep them leaning towards the west. Besides, western firms need another cheap production source when things inevitably go south with China.