July 17, 2005, It keeps going... and going... and going...
"It" would be the Chinese economic machine... our visit to People's Daily tells us that China's Central Bank reports China's foreign exchange ("forex") reserves on hand (that's "cash in the bank") have increased to over $700 billion, with a 51% increase on a year to year basis. We can couple this with the (correct, in my view) observation of a key European Union official that China's growth and development presented more opportunity than threat to the rest of the world.
We talked about this in a recent post... is China's development an actual threat, or do we just perceive it as such? Or... is what China really doing just suckering us into spending a fortune to fend off a threat that doesn't really exist in the hope that they can ultimately defeat us in a manner similar to the revisionist-fantasy-version of how St. Ron singlehandedly defeated the Soviet Union without firiing a shot by making it spend itself to death?
The question still stands...
On a side-note, I recently turned off all comments for: one commenter abused comments sufficiently to make me reconsider whether I want to even permit comments any longer (you know who you are). The comment was deleted and the offender "I.P. address banned". But I'm not sure that's enough. As you can see from the comments that I leave up, its not that I'm at all squeamish about posting comments of people who disagree with me, even in the strongest of terms. But there are some things up with which I will not put.
That said, I'm turning comments back on... for the moment... Play nicely, boys and girls. Or I'll close the playground.