> On Nov 17, 2009, at 8:45 PM, SA wrote:
>
>> Why is it imperialist for the US to set a dollar price for Chinese
>> currency, but it's not imperialist when China sets a yuan price for
>> U.S. currency?
>
> Because it's unilateral grandstanding of a very risky sort. When Bush
> did this sort of thing with guns, liberals got very upset. But
> apparently it's ok to do it with currencies, even if it does threaten
> to upset a fundamental relationship in the world economy that could
> blow everything up if it happened traumatically. And it's a very odd
> way for a wobbly dominant power to treat a rising power that's also
> its creditor to the tune of $1 trillion or more. Obviously the whole
> China-US relationship isn't sustainable in its present form, but
> altering it in this macho way - as if we didn't have plenty of our own
> problems to deal with - is insane.
[I'm late to this - I think I have H1N1. If I die, I'm totally suing Goldman Sachs.]
I doubt Dean would blow up the US-China economic relationship, or do anything traumatic. I picture his idea more as a quiet newspaper leak from the WH saying, "here's one possibility we're considering," to make Beijing take the problem seriously. As for Eric's point, what about the millions of workers in places like Ecuador, where China's unilateral overpricing of dollars equals overpricing of their local currency, and thus greater unemployment? So far China hasn't responded to moral suasion.
SA