He Hate Me

Great news item on the internet today.  London's Financial Times reports China "will continue to buy US Treasury bonds even though it knows the dollar will depreciate because (US debt) remains its only option in a perilous world."

That quote says so much about how incestuously addled the world economy is.

To promote order at home, China fuels its economy by exporting its goods to the USA and other first world countries.  Meanwhile, the US willfully racks up ever larger trade deficits to enable its citizenry to buy ever more goods -- cheaply -- while exporting its EPA-regulated smokestacks and OSHA-protected jobs to countries where pollution and labor injuries are seen as a cost -- nay! a virtue -- of progress.

Then the bubble pops.  The US realizes for years it has outsourced its jobs and industriousness.  China faces fact that it has nowhere to send its goods; no way to employ its oceans of people.  The populations are rebellious:

• Us:  Swimming in crap we don't need leveraged by debt we can't afford, governed by incompetents and vampires.
• Them:  Swimming in glitzy squalor (you can't drink tap water even in Beijing's best 5-star hotel) and slavelike working conditions (no pensions, unemployment insurance, or medical coverage), governed by thugs and snakes.

Or as Luo Ping, Director General of the China Banking Regulatory Commission put it:  "We hate you guys...we know the dollar is going to depreciate...but there's nothing much we can do."  Hey Ping: Ditto, dude!

In the absence of true progress -- ie. radically new products & technologies -- the world fights over thinner slices of the same pie. That's the real reason why we're being subjected to more regulation and government intrusion into the private sector.

The crazy part is the USA is still viewed as safe(st) harbor in an otherwise "perilous world."  I guess that's true.  Unlike England, we can actually still make something here.  Of course, it all causes global warming.

Mucous, is the Yurt on high ground?