[bactrimtab]

while Americans are manipulated into side games about bonuses and stadium naming rights, China is showing that it learned the real lesson, no one country can be trusted with management of the world's reserve currency. that the heart of the current bust is irresponsible management of the world's reserve currency, not CDO's and ARM's which were but symptoms of the disease.
China called for the creation of a new currency to eventually replace the dollar as the world's standard, proposing a sweeping overhaul of global finance that reflects developing nations' growing unhappiness with the U.S. role in the world economy...Mr. Zhou argued for reducing the dominance of a few individual currencies, such as the dollar, euro and yen, in international trade and finance. Most nations concentrate their assets in those reserve currencies, which exaggerates the size of flows and makes financial systems overall more volatile, Mr. Zhou said...
Moving to a reserve currency that belongs to no individual nation would make it easier for all nations to manage their economies better, he argued, because it would give the reserve-currency nations more freedom to shift monetary policy and exchange rates...A spokeswoman for the U.S. Treasury Department declined to comment on Mr. Zhou's views. In recent weeks, senior Obama administration officials have sought to reassure Beijing that the current U.S. spending spree is a short-term effort to restart the stalled American economy, not evidence of long-term U.S. profligacy....Mr. Zhou argued, without mentioning the dollar by name, that the loss of the dollar's de facto reserve status would benefit the U.S. by avoiding future crises. Because other nations continued to park their money in U.S. dollars, the argument goes, the Federal Reserve was able to pursue an irresponsible policy in recent years, keeping interest rates too low for too long and thereby helping to inflate a bubble in the housing market.... China Takes Aim at Dollar - WSJ.com

[gogFloark]

I suspect China doesn't really want a different reserve currency but does want Washington to get its act together and focus on the problem. I'm guessing the announcement was more a signal along that line than an actual statement of what China wants to do.

[bactrimtab]

I suspect China doesn't really want a different reserve currency but does want Washington to get its act together and focus on the problem. I'm guessing the announcement was more a signal along that line than an actual statement of what China wants to do.

whichever it is, it means they don't believe the garbage washington have been spouting offf about "deregulation" and other progressive nincompoop ideas. the basis for this irresponsible behavior was the federal resesrve itself with the tacit approval of uncle sam. I tend to doubt that china wouldn't rather have an international currency, I think they probably would. in the short term though, they want a less profligate US, it would appear.
Gary Becker, the winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences..Mr. Becker sees the finger prints of big government all over today's economic woes. When I ask him about the sources of the mania in housing prices, the first culprit he names is the Fed. Low interest rates, he says, were "partly, maybe mainly, due to the Fed's policy of keeping [its] interest rates very low during 2002-2004." A second reason rates were low was the "high savings rates primarily from Asia and also from the rest of the world."

"People debate the relative importance of the two and I don't think we know exactly," Mr. Becker admits. But what is clear is that "when you have low interest rates, any long-lived assets tend to go up in price because they are based upon returns accruing over many years. When interest rates are low you don't discount these returns very much and you get high asset prices."

On top of that, Mr. Becker says, there were government policies aimed at "extending the scope of homeownership in the United States to low-credit, low-income families." This was done through "the Community Reinvestment Act in the '70s and then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac later on" and it put many unqualified borrowers into the mix.

The third effect, Mr. Becker says, was the "bubble mentality." By this "I mean that much of the additional lending and borrowing was based on expectations that prices would continue to rise at rates we now recognize, and should have recognized then, were unsustainable." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123759849467801485.html