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One step forwards,Ten steps Back

In order to demonstrate the dysfunctionality of our “Floating” currency system, look at this article on “The US-China Ponzi scheme,” by Jon Markman at MSN Money.

Hint: this makes Madoff look like an Eagle scout.

Comments 2

  1. J.E. Dyer wrote:

    Stop the deficit spending and the UNCASHABLE T-Bills go away.

    July 17th, 2009 at 4:18 pm

  2. CK MacLeod wrote:

    Excellent article, btw. Or maybe I just think that because it conforms to much of my thinking about China, against the China bulls that are still rummaging around.

    Two sections stood out to me:

    The description of the Chinese Catch-22 from an economist:

    “People need to realize that China doesn’t actually have any real U.S. money,” Das says. “Unless they can turn in their bonds and exchange them for something else, they’re only paper assets. Yet if they try to exit the position, they’ll destabilize the dollar, and the value of the rest of their assets will plunge. And that’s not even their biggest problem. It’s that they also need to keep buying Treasurys, or interest rates will go up and their capital losses will be terrible.”…In short, Das says, Beijing thought it had discovered the perfect scheme for establishing independence from the West, yet it has instead made its dependence worse than ever.

    and:

    There are no good solutions. The Chinese need to open their markets and let their currency float on the open market, but they won’t for political reasons. And the U.S. needs to either halt its runaway deficit spending so that the world is not even more flooded with our debt, or swallow its pride and issue Treasurys denominated in Chinese currency. That probably won’t happen either. Which means there is only one solution left: a long, slow, boring, lonely, soul-crushing process of digging out from under the piles of debt that got us into this mess.

    July 18th, 2009 at 12:22 am

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