Category Archives: China

The Environment: China’s Achilles Heel?

My Japanese friends have often said that China has a 5,000 year history of not living up to its potential. When I’ve passed that view along to Westerners, they’ve scoffed, viewing the Chinese juggernaut to be unstoppable. The Japanese may yet be proven correct. This post at Gristmill points to an article by Christina Larson […]

Nouriel Roubini on the Instability of Bretton Woods 2

The Bear Stearns/CDO drama has taken attention away from other worrisome conditions in the economy, and the biggest one is “global imbalances,” which is shorthand for the US running continuing, large current account deficits that are financed for the most part by foreign central banks, particularly those of China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. We’ve lived […]

Wal-Mart’s Imports Cost US Jobs

The concept that cheap imports result in job losses should be a no-brainer, but it is still greeted with considerable resistance in some circles. Let’s be clear on a few points: while open trade in theory creates benefits to all parties, the system we have isn’t open trade, but managed trade. Most other countries negotiate […]

CDOs: China to the Rescue?

Felix Salmon commented on an intriguing and colorful post by Steve Waldman that argues that it’s in China’s best interest to buy a few CDOs and save the Street and the hedge fund industry from a meltdown and possible jail time. Here is the meat of Waldman’s argument: Here’s where the dragon comes in. Several […]

The Financial Times Warns the US Against Getting Tough with the Chinese

This is one of those days when there is quite a lot of good material, so forgive me for being brief. The Financial Times, on its editorial page, issued a warning to the US about getting chippy with the Chinese about the value of its currency. It did not stress some of the reasons argued […]

"The Asian Crisis After Ten Years"

Below is an excellent post by Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics and Political Science at UC Berkeley, at the new blog VoxEU. The post posits that the biggest risk to Asia is an asset crash, and looks at America’s experience during its industrializing phase to see what lessons might be learned. He determines that whether […]

84 Siberian Tigers Born in China

I figure readers would like to hear good news now and again. From PhysOrg: In this photo released by China’s Xinhua News Agency, three cubs are seen near their mother at the Siberian Tiger Park in Harbin, capital of northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province. (AP) — Eighty-four Siberian tigers, among the world’s rarest animals, have been […]

Be Careful What You Ask For: Yuan Edition

The US has spent considerable time and energy hectoring the Chinese about the artificially low value of its currency (although there is considerable disagreement among experts as to how undervalued it really is). The notion that the currency is the chief culprit has become so fixed in the public imagination that Congress is determined to […]

Larry Summers: "Practical Steps to Climate Control"

Larry Summers keeps getting better and better as an op-ed writer. His current article in the Financial Times lays out a series of practical recommendations on what to do about climate change. He focuses on the problem of the developing world, since they will account for 75% of the increase in greenhouse gases, and as […]

Roubini (via Martin Wolf) on Global Imbalances

I’m a bit late to get to this item, a predictably good article by the Financial Times’ Martin Wolf on Nouriel Roubini’s observations about why Asian countries became so willing to finance our deficits (short answer: they decided to keep their currencies cheap after the 1997 emerging markets crisis) and whether this situation is sustainable […]

Stiglitz: China Holds the Better Cards if Things Get Ugly

Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz can be blunt. In an interview with MarketWatch, he says that our dependence on Chinese capital puts us in a not-so-great bargaining position. He also pointed out in Congressional testimony that the Chinese have no reason to open their financial markets since they don’t need capital. And our focus […]

End of Dollar Hegemony Coming?

One of the funny things about slow motion train wrecks in the financial arena is that even when they are painfully obvious, they can be so long in coming that the Cassandras come to look like idiots, or worse, throw in the towel. Remember the dot com era. Anyone with an iota of common sense […]

China Negotiations: Paulson Coming Up Empty-Handed?

We predicted, given China’s blistering response to America’s imposition of countervailing duties on coated paper manufacturers (a small amount of goods, but a big shot across the bow) and its aggressive posture in the negotiation of the language of the third IPCC report, that Paulson’s efforts to obtain trade concessions and a revaluation of the […]