Updated: 'The Truth Behind China's Currency Peg'

China, Debt, Inflation

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’

China, Debt, Economy, Inflation

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.”

Update II: Wear A Turban, Not A Tux (Transparency)

Barack Obama, Celebrity, China, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Government

Wikipedia: “A state dinner is a dinner or banquet paid by a government [read: taxpayers] and hosted by a head of state in his or her official residence in order to renew and celebrate diplomatic ties between the host country and the country of a foreign head of state or head of government who was issued an invitation.”

In the tradition of celebrating “crap countries” (Ali G. vernacular), BO’s first state dinner is in honor of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

Why not? One of BO’s first major addresses as president was delivered in “Egypt’s capital, early in June. There, the president prostrated himself before the Muslim world, offering up prolix praise for the religion of peace.”

President Bush hosted a glittery gala for the same Singh only four years ago.

You the taxpayer most certainly cannot press your nose against the White House windows to get a glimpse of the well-fed, celebrity guests. You’ll have to be content to read about them HERE.

To give credit where its due, when asked “about the tense relationship between India and Pakistan,” Obama said “it was not the role of the United States to intervene and solve such problems.”

That’s all well and good, but then what is he doing beefing up American presence in Afghanistan?

Update I: On the other hand, here’s the neoconservative foreign-policy perspective on Indian-American bond from The Heritage Foundation, chief of which is “the Indo-Pakistani regional rivalry,” terrorism, and, of course, an acknowledgment of the Chinese threat:

“President Obama rightly took advantage of an opportunity to reaffirm ties to India and recognize the U.S.-India partnership as one of the “defining partnerships of the 21st century.” The two countries now need to follow through on their leaders’ pronouncements on a range of issues including education, trade, health, energy, defense, nuclear nonproliferation, space, and the environment.” …

“President Obama hopefully took the opportunity in his private meeting with Singh to provide reassurances that the U.S. is attuned to Indian strategic concerns vis-à-vis China, particularly their ongoing border disputes and Chinese efforts to extend its influence into South Asia. Over the last three years, China has increasingly pressured India over their disputed borders by questioning Indian sovereignty over the state of Arunachal Pradesh and by stepping up probing operations along different parts of their shared frontier.”

Update II (Nov. 25): Transparency. Don’t expect it. Yesterday, the adoring sycophants at CNN—in particular, Anderson Cooper’s fittingly dim sidekick—were salivating for footage from BO’s party, only to be told by a fawning colleague that the administration was not allowing the press to take pics of the prez and his party. Feasts and festivities amid hunger and hardship across the country don’t make for the best optics.

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.

MORE on the Obama connection.

• 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.