quote: M K Bhadrakumar's recent article India frets over Obama's Chinamania [Mar 14] was excellent. However, there was one misconception, which was not actually created by the author but a sort of accepted truth that everyone keeps repeating to each other. This is that China's surplus (that the US is hoping will finance US borrowing for their economic recovery stimulus) is actually largely virtual - it exists mainly on paper, just like everything else in modern, American-style economics. China would indeed have a terrific surplus if only the US paid what it owed, but the US is borrowing (from China) to pay China! Meanwhile, the Chinese are lending American money that they don't have (because America can't pay them) so that the US can keep spending, because how else would China sell what it produces. This is the kind of cuckoo mathematics in which two plus two is not just five, but rather five billion. America and China desperately need each other because together they are playing a huge scam on the rest of the world. Using the kind of Arthur Anderson accounting that made Enron (in the US) and Satyam (in India) appear like rock-solid profitable companies - when in fact they were completely hollow loss-making machines - the US and China have built up tremendous virtual economic numbers, which they can exploit to bully their way around in other markets and throw the entire fundamentals of economics out of whack. So now, thanks to these two countries together violating every basic rule of common sense (including the first law of thermodynamics, which basically implies that you cannot get something out of nothing), the entire global economic system is starting to resemble the kind of wacko economics practiced by the character Milo Minderbinder in the Joseph Heller book Catch-22! Amit Sharma Cincinnati, OH, USA (Mar 16,'09)
...consider the recent comments of Luo Ping, China's Banking Regulatory Commission deputy head, :
quote: "We hate you guys. Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion ... we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys but there is nothing much we can do."