Beware the Loan Sharks
I found the following quote by Chalmers Johnson in an article from the October 2006 issue of Acres USA magazine. I thought that it was a fitting follow-up to yesterday's post. It provides a glimpse into the uncomfortable position in which the recent unrest in Tibet is placing the US this Olympic year.
The degree to which we have become dependent on foreign countries is truly astonishing, and there are numerous economists who tell you it is unwise for the world’s largest debtor — which is us — to go around insulting its bankers. We do that all the time to the Chinese, who invest billions of dollars buying American treasury certificates and things like that in order to retain access to this market, continuing to sell as profitably as they are to firms like Wal-Mart, but we send carrier task forces off their coast, and we’re forever making threatening statements about them. All it would take is for the Minister of Finance of China to decide that they have too much of their reserves in dollars — which isn’t a particularly good currency anyway these days — and they ought to start shifting to the Euro. At that point, the American stock exchange would collapse.
