Here's a relevant passage from an article in the current New Yorker:
Every working day, we borrow more than three billion dollars from
foreigners, notably the central banks of China and other Asian
nations, in order to pay our import bills and keep our interest
rates low. Nouriel Roubini, an economist at New York University,
calls this “vender financing.” The Chinese lend us cash; we buy
their goods. ( http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/
060206ta_talk_cassidy )
Someone else on the board suggested that all we need to do is wait
out the economic storm and export our culture, because after the
workforces of nations with developing economies achieve the same
lifestyle as the workforces of first-world countries we'll be able to
compete again. That may well be true, but I sure don't expect to live
long enough to find out -- there are more than 2.3 billion people in
China and India alone, and plenty more in the rest of the world. And
if we visualize money as a liquid asset, we can expect that, like
water, incomes will seek their own level in a globalized economy.
That will be good for workers in countries where the average wage is
currently $2,000 per year, but a disaster for those who are currently
earning an average of $35,000 per year.
And Bush's concern about oil? That was just SOTU happy talk -- the
very next day his energy secretary and national economic adviser said
that he didn't mean it. (And heaven forbid that the concept of
confronting the problem of a dwindling resource by consuming less
would ever be floated as part of a solution!)
My conservative parents learned the value of conservation during the
Depression and WW II; those lessons have been ignored for too long,
at our peril.
Yeah, I'm a worried, simple fella too.
On Feb 2, 2006, at 3:35 PM, Gary Hurst wrote:
how does an economy that makes nothing survive? I'm a simple fella
and that
question has me worried
On 2/2/06, Loren Faeth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I think the race is on. Will China end up owning the rest of the
world,
or
will Wally mart own China?
At 12:24 PM 2/2/2006, you wrote:
R A Bennell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Put in your bid now. We might
get sold
to China as they will soon have all
the money anyway.
Randy B in Canada
