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I recorded the video segment below on on RT America on Wednesday night (Notice my green tie for St. Patrick’s Day!). The overall gist of the clip was that the currency battle now brewing between China and the U.S. is mostly a political confrontation. There are reasonable ways out of this that don’t include a [...]

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Notable quotes in this 5 minute segment:
"They don’t want to look in the mirror. America doesn’t have a China problem. It really has a savings problem. America has the biggest shortfall of national savings of any leading country in modern history. And when you don’t have saving you have to run current account deficits to [...]

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Here’s how I see things playing out:

Congress looks at this report and concurs that the key to ending slower global growth is to correct global imbalances via a Chinese currency revaluation. Fair enough.
However, individual Congressmen, looking to reassure jobless constituents ahead of the midterm elections, will escalate by presenting bills to ‘punish’ China if [...]

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In late 2007 the global economy began to stumble, slipping into the abyss of a deep recession and financial panic. We are only now recovering from this stumble, in large part due to an unprecedented level of fiscal and monetary stimulus. Yet, no sooner is daylight within reach, we start attacking each other, tearing each [...]

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In reading Scott Sumner’s take on the China currency peg dilemma, I see that both he and Paul Krugman hit on the fundamental problem in the debate: reserves. Everyone is talking about the peg as if relaxing the peg will be the magic bullet to America’s current account problem. But this is clearly not the [...]

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FT.com – Asia’s inflation genie leaps out of the bottle
House prices to fall further as loan arrears rise – Independent.ie
TheMoneyIllusion » It’s China’s world, we just live in it (Krugman, round two)
More Americans live with multiple generations of family – USATODAY.com
FT.com – The weak renminbi is not just America’s problem
How [...]

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I am going to talk here a little bit about the looming trade war between China and the United States. But I am going to come at it from a side angle via some historical analogies.
Common folklore in the United States says that the Soviet Empire collapsed in large part due to the efforts of [...]

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Lehman Brothers
Lehman Hid Money With Help of Global Rules – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com
The Lehman Report: Is It Time for a Special Prosecutor?: Rational Irrationality : The New Yorker
Lehman: Regulators Chose to Deny, Extend and Pretend « naked capitalism
Another Disturbing Finding in Lehman Bros. Report | The Huffington Post Investigative Fund
The [...]

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With US midterm elections up ahead, we are already seeing political posturing by US politicians regarding China’s currency.  Democratic lawmakers are reportedly drawing up legislation that sets criteria on whether a country has a misaligned currency.  It would modify the current US Treasury semi-annual report to misalignment instead of manipulation.  The House Ways and Means [...]

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It’s curious how one and the same message is emanating from both Beijing and Berlin at the moment: “don’t blame us, it’s not our fault”. And it isn’t.
According to the Financial Times, the Chinese Authorities spent their morning pushing back against the mounting US criticism of their currency policy, arguing that their huge trade surplus [...]