Jun 18 2008
China Tongue Lashing Shows U.S. as the Real Cold War Loser
Now it’s China’s turn to publicly humiliate America.It’s one more display of our Cold War defeat that we seem to sweep under the rug.
This story in the New York Times reveals how China dissed America about our dim-witted economic policies. It’s hard to imagine this kind of attack ever taking place a few years ago. It truly reveals the shellacking we took in the Cold War from China and Russia.
The U.S. has been faking it for decades that we won the Cold War. We even tried to dictate terms of China: the valuation of the Chinese renminbi, state subsidies and food safety.
What America was really telling China is that no Communist economic model is capable of trouncing a free-market democracy. It sounded more like good old-fashioned Commie-bashing than enlightened 21st century trade negotiations.
As the Times revealed, China seemed to be “galled by the apparent hypocrisy of Americans telling them what to do while the American economy is at best stagnant.”
And that is China’s point…
A Chinese envoy to the World Trade Organization rebuked the U.S. to halt the dollar’s slide, which many experts blame for the current worldwide inflation. It’s a reversal of fortune for the Chinese, who have endured America’s insistence that the renminbi be untethered from the greenback to give us a fighting chance in the world markets.
Read between the lines from this great quote in the Times story and you’ll see the message that the U.S. is the real Cold War loser…
“U.S. credibility and the credibility of U.S. financial markets is zero everywhere in the world,” said Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia University who has sharply criticized the Bush administration and praised China’s economic management in the past. “Anybody looking at this from the outside says, ‘There’s been a lot of hot air coming out of the U.S., so why should we listen to these guys when they didn’t know how to manage risk?’ ”
Nicholas R. Lardy, a China expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said in an interview with the Times that “the Chinese are reacting adversely, and I think with some justification.”
Why is it important to you as to whether or not we won the Cold War?
Because if you assume that we LOST, your entire perspective changes about how to invest in emerging markets. Let’s face it, there are no more safe markets left to invest in. America had been the safe harbor of the world — leading investors everywhere to cling to the fiction that we are the big winners of the Cold War.
Today, though, volatility is way of life for most investors. Factor that assumption into your investment strategy, and you can see the advantage of putting your money into emerging markets such as China that have a more robust upside than the U.S. for long-term profit potential.
–Irwin Greenstein
