China’s decision to revalue its currency upward by 2.1 percent and scrap its peg to the U.S. dollar in favor of a basket of currencies is sending rumbles through the global financial system. This is the first change in the value of the renminbi (RMB), or yuan, since 1995, when its rate was set at 8.28 to the dollar. The change,… return to article
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Reader Comments (3)Page 1 of 1 pagesAccording to some financial publications, the revaluation of China’s currency is only about 1/4 of a penny. That’s hardly a serious revalued currency, especially if you think of the trade imbalance that the U.S. has with the rest of the world.
Making Wal-Mart products produced in China will hardly help this trade imbalance. If anything, once inflation begins rearing its ugly head seriously, the U. S. consumers will pay more regardless of cheap imports. And, with rising inflation, there is no way that U.S. can compete on a level which will make exports rise. It’s just not in the cards, no matter how you count it. Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times has accurately pointed out such pie-in-the-sky monetary policy pursued by the Bush administration as meaningless. CAFTA, NAFTA and other trade agreements only make it worse for working Americans because they encourage U.S. manufacturing to go offshore and overseas. I’m not talking here about creating McJobs which the Bush mob keep crowing over that have increased. Even at 270,000 jobs added last month according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)manufacturing jobs continued to decline. Just how many more of these once-good paying jobs can workers lose and expect to make it up by taking two or three McJobs just to make up for the lost wages they once earned with one good manufacturing job?
Also, as Krugman points out, War Forever is good for quite a few in the defense industry since 1.3 million jobs have been added in that single sector alone in the last two years. If the so-called Iraq War ends, then, pfffft! There goes lots of jobs and with it Halliburton’s and other no-bid defense contractors’ big profits.
Like Eisenhower warned about the military industrial complex, we have now reached the saturation point where Bush will need more wars if he is to prop up this tenuous economy. Right now the economy is dependent on Bush exploiting the fear factor to pump more and more taxpayer dollars into keeping U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghaninstan where little comes back to American workers in the form of bigger paychecks.
On the contrary, because of Bush’s “preemptive strike” policy, he has fueled the fears of other countries like China to take their U.S. dollars that they are holding as collateral for Bush’s profligacy, and building up their military faster than the U.S. Army can recruit the bare minimum number of soldiers to fight Bush’s war of choice in Iraq, let alone any future Bush war adventures. In other words, Bush has created the most financially and militarily unstable world than anyone in history.
Like the Japanese who bought up all the U.S. scrap metal and then converted it into a huge war machine that was used to attack our country at Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Chinese are accelerating their military buildup of troops and equipment, all paid for with Bush’s borrowing binge which is being financed by U.S. government securities.
If Bush thinks he’s having a tough time getting out of Iraq, wait until the Chinese premier Wen Jiabao calls Bush’s bluff when those super-silent Chinese submarines surround Taiwan, a country that the U.S. has been committed to defending for over 40 years. If Bush was just entering his first term, he and his propagandists like Karl Rove would be blaming this situation on his predecessor. But he’s almost one year into his second term and only he is responsible for letting our guard down and ignoring the real threats our country faces while he pursues his vanity war in Iraq.
Former Chinese Premier Jiang Zemin had this observation shortly after meeting Bush for the first time in early 2001: “..logically unsound, confused, unprincipled and unwise to the extreme.”
It’s truly amazing how prescient those words were because in my opinion Bush has not changed one iota.
Posted by Richard2 on Aug 14, 2005 at 10:54 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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Also by Jehangir Pocha
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