#1
Muslim parents who objected to young children being given books advocating same-sex marriage and adoption at one school last year had their wishes respected and the offending material withdrawn. This year, Muslim and Christian parents at another school objecting to the same material have not only had their objections ignored but have been threatened with prosecution if they withdraw their children.
The US Federal Reserve's policy of printing money to buy Treasury debt threatens to set off a serious decline of the dollar and compel China to redesign its foreign reserve policy, according to a top member of the Communist hierarchy.
Cheng Siwei, former vice-chairman of the Standing Committee and now head of China's green energy drive, said Beijing was dismayed by the Fed's recourse to "credit easing".
"We hope there will be a change in monetary policy as soon as they have positive growth again," he said at the Ambrosetti Workshop, a policy gathering on Lake Como. "If they keep printing money to buy bonds it will lead to inflation, and after a year or two the dollar will fall hard. Most of our foreign reserves are in US bonds and this is very difficult to change, so we will diversify incremental reserves into euros, yen, and other currencies."
"If they keep printing money to buy bonds it will lead to inflation, and after a year or two the dollar will fall hard. Most of our foreign reserves are in US bonds and this is very difficult to change, so we will diversify incremental reserves into euros, yen, and other currencies," he said.
China's reserves are more than -- $2 trillion, the world's largest.
"Gold is definitely an alternative, but when we buy, the price goes up. We have to do it carefully so as not to stimulate the markets," he added.
The comments suggest that China has become the driving force in the gold market and can be counted on to buy whenever there is a price dip, putting a floor under any correction.
Mr Cheng said the Fed's loose monetary policy was stoking an unstable asset boom in China. "If we raise interest rates, we will be flooded with hot money. We have to wait for them. If they raise, we raise. Credit in China is too loose. We have a bubble in the housing market and in stocks so we have to be very careful, because this could fall down."
Mr Cheng said China had learned from the West that it is a mistake for central banks to target retail price inflation and take their eye off assets.
"This is where Greenspan went wrong from 2000 to 2004," he said. "He thought everything was alright because inflation was low, but assets absorbed the liquidity."
Mr Cheng said China had lost 20m jobs as a result of the crisis and advised the West not to over-estimate the role that his country can play in global recovery.
China's task is to switch from export dependency to internal consumption, but that requires a "change in the ideology of the Chinese people" to discourage excess saving. "This is very difficult".
Mr Cheng said the root cause of global imbalances is spending patterns in US (and UK) and China. "The US spends tomorrow's money today," he said. "We Chinese spend today's money tomorrow. That's why we have this financial crisis."
Yet the consequences are not symmetric. "He who goes borrowing, goes sorrowing," said Mr Cheng.
It was a quote from US founding father Benjamin Franklin.
#2
Fed is not printing, it's borrowing from banks - banks send their reserves to Fed, Fed pays interest on deposited reserves. Fed uses deposited reserves to buy Treasuries. Not that this is a good thing - it still smells like a Ponzi scheme.
#6
No mistakes here, none at all. This is a carefully orchestrated plan which may have been decades in the making. It is currently executed by a coalition comprised of Soros, Rahm, Axelrod NYC Amish mafia, along with Barry and his cadre of Liberation Theologists and free lunch program sympathizers.
#7
Continued threats, harranging, and poking with sticks at Barry failed to do the trick. This morning our alternative shadow government, the Congressional Black Caucus came out of the closet in open support of the so called...Gov't Option.
#10
...our alternative shadow government, the Congressional Black Caucus...
Again, the question begs an answer. What kind of furor would ensue if someone started a Congressional White Caucus, a Congressional Irish Caucus, a Congressional Polish Caucus, or ... ? I think you get the idea.
#6
Article isn't very specific. There is a substantial number of debt instruments each with its own character.
Some of the TARP debt has already been paid back (typically govt loans to companies that didn't really want the loans in the first place). Some debt is to AIG and will have to be recollateralized at a discount. Some debt is to GM which may end up being vapor. Some debt is in the form of T bills, T bonds etc.
Posted by: lord garth ||
09/07/2009 14:00 Comments ||
Top||
The L.A. Times. Interesting position the cheerleaders are taking on the issue.
Has Afghanistan turned into Barack Obama's Vietnam? It could, but it hasn't yet. At this point, there are still crucial differences between the two wars, including:
* Support at home. The American public's support for the war has certainly declined, but eight years after 9/11, enthusiasm for its original goal of destroying Al Qaeda remains strong.
Despite the best efforts of the Democratic party and the legacy media.
* A smaller, more targeted fighting force. More than 500,000 U.S. troops were in Vietnam in 1969; more than 58,000 died in the course of the war. U.S. troop strength in Afghanistan will reach 68,000 later this year; as of last week, 562 had been killed in action -- about one-hundredth the toll of the Vietnam War.
* Honest military assessments. In Vietnam, U.S. commanders sugarcoated their analysis for the folks back home. In Afghanistan, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael G. Mullen, recently called the situation "serious and deteriorating." And Mullen, who began his career as a Navy officer in Vietnam, makes a point of promising no quick victory. "By no means do I think we can turn [Afghanistan] around in 12 to 18 months, but I think we can start," he told me last week.
The war has been long, costly and unsuccessful, but Obama and his generals still have a chance to turn it around.
Meanwhile, the Taliban, which came to power in 1996 because it promised to be incorruptible, has reportedly appointed ombudsmen -- ombudsmen! -- in the growing areas it controls.
The more difficult question is whether the Afghan government can take advantage of whatever security the Americans give it. That's why the most important number to watch may not be Obama's troop increase but the "civilian surge" of advisors, aid workers, agricultural experts and anti-corruption investigators who are also moving into the country. That number is much smaller, and its impact is far less certain.
Richard C. Holbrooke, the diplomatic heavyweight who's running the civilian effort, calls the approach "smart power." Holbrooke is trying to increase the number of U.S. civilian officials in Afghanistan from about 450 to about 900 by the end of the year, and says the program is on track.
But that's unlikely to be nearly enough. With Karzai's central government discredited, the U.S. needs to bypass Kabul and instead funnel money and other assistance to local governments in Afghanistan's 34 provinces and 399 districts. And that could take a lot more than 900 people. "We need to stop talking about 'smart power' as if we had it," said Anthony H. Cordesman, a civilian scholar who has advised McChrystal. "We don't have the civilians in the field. The so-called civilian surge will not come close to the minimal requirements."
The one option that won't work, Obama's advisors argue , is withdrawal. "There's no way to defeat Al Qaeda, which is the mission, with just that approach," Mullen said. "You can't do it remotely."
To learn whether the war is even winnable, and to avoid seeing it turn into another Vietnam, Obama needs to do two things. He needs to rally public and congressional support behind another troop increase; that, oddly enough, will be the easy part. And he needs to find ways to make Afghanistan's government work, by ramping up the civilian surge and getting aid directly to local leaders who deliver services to their constituents -- even if, in some cases, they aren't as clean as we'd like. That will be the hard part.
#1
I think a lot of people on the right don't understand wealth creation either.
Wealth is simply created by the reciprocal exchange of time. Or comparative advantage.
There's a lot of harmful monopolies created only by the power and violent threats of the state that if eliminated or properly externalised would enable any country doing so to be far richer.
#4
try that social science experiment in someplace other than the Deep South or Texas, then compare the results, places like London England , Hayden Lake, Idaho and Tokyo Japan. cover the gamut.....
#3
FREEREPUBLIC > IS ANOTHER 9-11 ABOUT TO UNFOLD
[worse than the original = light commuter planes + o'er major Amer cities]???
IMO more likely to occur closer to Year 2012 when ISLAMIST IRAN = MILTERRS, etal. goes formally fully nukulaar. E.g. NORTH KOREA = repor still WIP for dev the URANIUM + PLUTONIUM NUCMATS.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
