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RedditThere has never been anything like it--not in business, at least. The Chinese work their tails off earning billions of dollars and then, instead of spending their profits, Mao Zedong's grandchildren lend us Americans back the dollars we've paid them so that we can buy yet more stuff from the commie-capitalists. We buy their baby booties and television sets, and they take the money and lend it back to us. It's like getting the contents of your local Super Wal-Mart for free, but in Washington this strange circularity has been the cause of nonstop bitching and moaning for years.
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Strong Medicine
Melissa Holbrook Pierson: An epic portrait of the Tianenmen Square protests, Ma Jian's Beijing Coma is one hell of a powerful novel.
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Fathers and Sons
Matt Steinglass: Three recent books trace the generational fault lines of the Confucian family during China's past and present revolutions.
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Who's Your Buddha?
Howard W. French: A collection of oral histories reveal a new understanding of the modern Chinese experience.
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Portrait of a Panic
Nicholas von Hoffman: America is shaken by images of panicked customers lined up to withdraw money from the failed IndyMac Bank.
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Hold China Accountable on Darfur
Ruth Messinger & Jerry Fowler: Don't let Olympic fever obscure the role China plays in the Sudanese government's reign of terror, rape and killing.
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Taiwan Declares Peace on China
Robert Scheer: You can't trust the Chinese. I don't care if you're talking about those communists on the mainland or the other guys on Taiwan; they just won't follow the wargames script that our weapons hawks had counted on.
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Where's the Beef?
Bruce Cumings: South Koreans won't be buffaloed by US beef or the Bush Administration's erratic policies.
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How Wall Street Wrecked Your Retirement
Nicholas von Hoffman: The architects of America's disfunctional financial system allowed Wall Street gamble with our retirement savings--and now they appear to have lost it.
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Portrait of a Panic
Nicholas von Hoffman: America is shaken by images of panicked customers lined up to withdraw money from the failed IndyMac Bank.
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Talking Points for an Energy Crisis
Nicholas von Hoffman: Now that rising gas prices and plummeting sales of gas hog vehicles has gotten everyone's attention, let's talk about a long-term plan.
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Oil Change
Nicholas von Hoffman: Forget change you can believe in and start dealing with the changes coming at you as fast as the price of fuel makes its way skyward.
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Bernanke's Big Bet
Nicholas von Hoffman: The Fed Chief believes if he pumps enough money into the economy, he can stop the slide of house prices and thus stave off financial disaster. How's he doing? So far, not so good.
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A Devil's Dictionary of Finance
Nicholas von Hoffman: An irreverent lexicon of terms that paved the way to the subprime mortgage meltdown.
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Federal Reserve Freakout
Nicholas von Hoffman: The Fed scrambles for solutions to the mortgage meltdown--but saving prudent homeowners also involves bailing out a huge number of wealthy speculators. What good is that?
Washington did not gloat that commie pinkos might have been hornswoggled into paying too high a price for Unocal. The sound of gnashing teeth and thumping breasts reverberated through the nation's capital. Warnings against a nightmarish color combination of red economics and yellow peril filled the air. Irresistible pressure was put on Unocal's board not to sell out to Sino-collectivism or communists in capitalist clothing.
We have been there before.
In the 1970s the air was heavy with "woe is us" when the Arabs, flush from a big jump in oil prices, were thought to be about to buy California and ship it to Saudi Arabia. Instead, those Arab guys trimmed their beards, threw off their djellabas and hit on our women.
In the 1980s it was the Japanese who were giving editorial writers hissy fits. Even though they wore suits and were good at math, they scared the hell out of the policy-wonk community when it was learned that they were using the profits gained from selling us superior automobiles to snap up Pebble Beach Golf Course and Rockefeller Center. In the end, they lost their kimonos on both deals.
The Unocal board of directors caved to the political clamor. The company is being sold to the lowest bidder. Elsewhere Canadians, who prefer profit to principle, quickly made themselves a heck of a lot of it by selling PetroKazakhstan, an oil company in the country of more or less the same name, to another Chinese outfit. Unocal stockholders looked on as they suffered a billion-dollar cash loss and they still have to pay for the Cristal.
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