Via the Business Insider: “Peter Schiff takes on [noted doomsayer] Nouriel Roubini on the subject of gold. Nouriel Roubini believes every asset, including gold, is over-inflated due to the dollar carry trade. Schiff disagrees, and says Roubini doesn’t understand the fundamentals behind gold — that it’s going to keep heading higher as a result of government action.”
Category Archives: Inflation
Updated: 'The Truth Behind China's Currency Peg'
The synophobic narrative in this country has it that somehow China’s currency manipulation is responsible for America’s trade imbalance with that country. In a manner, the pegging of the renminbi to the dollar has enabled America’s grotesque, Fellini-worthy excesses. But the relatively austere Chinese are not responsible for our appetites.
Explains Peter Schiff:
“The peg, they argue, offers China a competitive advantage by making its products cheaper in U.S. markets, thus allowing Chinese firms to gobble up market share and steal jobs from U.S. manufacturers. The thought is that were China to allow its currency to rise, American manufactures would regain their lost edge, and both manufacturing firms and the jobs formerly associated with them would return. In this narrative, the struggle centers on the United States’ diminishing leverage in persuading the Chinese to lay down their unfair weaponry. It’s a sympathetic picture, but it tells the wrong story.
While the peg certainly is responsible for much of the world’s problems, its abandonment would cause severe hardship in the United States. In fact, for the U.S., de-pegging would cause the economic equivalent of cardiac arrest. Our economy is currently on life support provided by an endless flow of debt financing from China. These purchases are the means by which China maintains the relative value of its currency against the dollar. As the dollar comes under even more downward pressure, China’s purchases must increase to keep the renminbi from rising. By maintaining the peg, China enables our politicians and citizens to continue spending more than they have and avoiding the hard choices necessary to restore our long-term economic health.”
Update (Nov. 25): Pat Buchanan too believes the US is owed Chinese “gratitude” for “throwing open its market to Chinese goods”:
had it not been for U.S. magnanimity … Beijing would never have registered the double-digit growth rates it has seen for the past two decades. Some gratitude China is showing.
In other words, Americans had been begged to buy mounds of cheap Chinese goods they had no interest in, and, out of the goodness of their hearts, bless them, they relented, bought Chinese stuff and catapulted China to “double-digit growth rates.”
Updated: ‘The Truth Behind China’s Currency Peg’
The synophobic narrative in this country has it that somehow China’s currency manipulation is responsible for America’s trade imbalance with that country. In a manner, the pegging of the renminbi to the dollar has enabled America’s grotesque, Fellini-worthy excesses. But the relatively austere Chinese are not responsible for our appetites.
Explains Peter Schiff:
“The peg, they argue, offers China a competitive advantage by making its products cheaper in U.S. markets, thus allowing Chinese firms to gobble up market share and steal jobs from U.S. manufacturers. The thought is that were China to allow its currency to rise, American manufactures would regain their lost edge, and both manufacturing firms and the jobs formerly associated with them would return. In this narrative, the struggle centers on the United States’ diminishing leverage in persuading the Chinese to lay down their unfair weaponry. It’s a sympathetic picture, but it tells the wrong story.
While the peg certainly is responsible for much of the world’s problems, its abandonment would cause severe hardship in the United States. In fact, for the U.S., de-pegging would cause the economic equivalent of cardiac arrest. Our economy is currently on life support provided by an endless flow of debt financing from China. These purchases are the means by which China maintains the relative value of its currency against the dollar. As the dollar comes under even more downward pressure, China’s purchases must increase to keep the renminbi from rising. By maintaining the peg, China enables our politicians and citizens to continue spending more than they have and avoiding the hard choices necessary to restore our long-term economic health.”
Update (Nov. 25): Pat Buchanan too believes the US is owed Chinese “gratitude” for “throwing open its market to Chinese goods”:
had it not been for U.S. magnanimity … Beijing would never have registered the double-digit growth rates it has seen for the past two decades. Some gratitude China is showing.
In other words, Americans had been begged to buy mounds of cheap Chinese goods they had no interest in, and, out of the goodness of their hearts, bless them, they relented, bought Chinese stuff and catapulted China to “double-digit growth rates.”
In Brief: Unemployment, Climagedon, Jihad
Debt, Economy, Energy, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, EU, Homeland Security, Inflation, Law, Propaganda, Pseudoscience, Regulation
• Mainstream press has stumbled on an alarming figure, which I reported way back on 8/28/2009 : “nearly 1 in 5 Americans is either out of work or under-employed.”
The real unemployment rate is 16.3 percent. The discrepancy between the official and the awful numbers has arisen because the former count, conveniently, “only those who have looked for work in the last four weeks.”
• Climagedon or, rather, ClimaGate. Reports The IBD: “Hacked e-mails from Britain’s Climate Research Unit are only the latest evidence of climate fraud. Just ask NASA’s James Hansen about the faking of climate data or EPA employees about the suppression of climate fact.”
For years, noted scientists and other global warming skeptics have been accused of being on the take, their research tainted and funded by grants from Big Oil and other fossil-fuel interests.
Now, it turns out, it’s the warm-mongers who are fudging the numbers and concealing the inconvenient truth.
• To further hobble the economy and contribute to the climate chicanery, the president “will propose an emissions reduction target at a U.N. climate change summit in Copenhagen next month, the White House said Monday. … Obama said during his trip to Asia last week that the U.S. and China want the Copenhagen summit to lead to an agreement that has ‘immediate operational effect.'”
“Reincarnation of the Reds” is what it is.
• Finally, “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the others are going to plead ‘not guilty.'” Read the cuss-studded comments from the Daily Kos coterie.
This is an unremarkable defense. Still, Obama will rue the day he brings this circus to New York. Posturing on the Left and the Right will not change the fact that a show trial of the 9/11 defendants will turn into a farce.