FREE MARKET PRINCIPLES: CHINA HOLDS THE CARDS

This one comes courtesy of Barrackaid #13. Very interesting 'inside baseball' read into what's quite possibly going on between the United States and China. The United States needs China to continue buying our debt and China needs to continue doing so. At issue is whose needs are greater. Based on Joseph Trevisani's take at FX Solutions, all you have to do to determine that is look at who is giving up more?

The answer would be the U.S.

The American President would like China’s cooperation on the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs, a more flexible currency policy for the yuan, open trade and continued Chinese purchase of American debt. He is likely to obtain only the last, the price for which will be all the others.

A little further into the article, it becomes a little clearer why:

President Obama will reassure President Hu that Washington takes its debt obligations seriously, that it is about to become serious about controlling Federal spending and that it holds to a strong dollar policy. President Hu will promise not to withdraw Chinese support from the Treasury market. The Chinese will pretend to believe the Americans and the Americans will not press them on any other topic.

The price for China’s continued support of the US debt market and by extension of the administration’s domestic agenda is American acquiescence in all international topics of importance to China. For the Chinese it is an excellent trade, a chance to neuter its greatest international adversary for the price of an investment it would probably have to make anyway. The basic fact of the trade is that China feels it has choices and the United States fears it does not. As long as a Chinese withdrawal from the US debt markets is more frightening to Washington than to Beijing China will have the upper hand in this relationship.

One would think that Obama is getting a very real lesson in how the free market works courtesy of the Chinese, yet when you couple Trevisani's last sentence with the soaring and record budget deficits Obama has managed to amass in less than one year, it really makes you wonder.

President Obama’s visit to Beijing is an acknowledgement of the new status quo in the world economy. China will set the terms of her trade for the world until the United States regains control of its own budget.

Be sure to read the WHOLE THING.

I wonder what Anita Dunn thinks about all this.

h/t to Barrackaid #13