Wednesday, March 17, 2010
china confidential
Obama Pushing for 'Regime Change' in Israel
Reliance Aiming for Big Stake in US Natural Gas
Is Paul Krugman All Wrong About the Yuan?
Wednesday, 17 March 2010
Of course, Israel is a democracy--the only one in the Middle East--and a sovereign state.
No matter. America's most pro-Palestinian, pro-Islamist President is meddling in Israeli politics, as reported here, although the author of the article pulls punches and is reluctant to embrace the term.
Maureen Dowd's take on Obama's "smackdown" of Israel is also worth reading.
Smacking Israel down ... and the dumbbell Democrats are just delighted. The Appeaser-in-Chief, who has made obeisance to America's enemies the foundation of his failed foreign policy, the President who physically bowed ... from the waist ... deeply and submissively ... to the king of Saudi Arabia, a petro-tyranny with no human or civil rights ... has finally shown some guts, the Democrats say. They celebrate the smackdown.
Incredible. Having failed to engage (appease and actually align with) Iran's Islamist regime, which has vowed to destroy Israel and dreams openly of "a world without America," and is closer than ever to producing the nuclear weapons that will enable the emboldened, monstrous mullahocracy to realize its evil dreams and ambitions, Barack Obama is out to change the democratically elected government of ... Israel ... a great and important ally, treating the government as a Third World or Eastern European regime ripe for destabilization, destined to be done away with, bound for the garbage heap of history (like Israel itself, whose miraculous rebirth in 1948 should have been aborted, according to Obama's left-wing backers).
Incredible and ironic. More than 70% of American Jewish voters chose the Muslim-born (according to Islamic law, which traces religion through the father) Obama over a trusted, proven friend, John McCain.
India's Reliance industries is aiming to buy a big stake in a huge, U.S. natural gas field that stretches from Virginia to New York. Click here for the story.
Like China, India is interested in acquiring real assets--and real energy--not the phony, green schemes and dreams that the Obama administration and his dumbbell Democrats are pushing while oil prices rise.
In his latest column in The New York Times Paul Krugman recommends that the US impose a 25% tariff on Chinese imports unless China appreciates the renminbi, its currency, whose principal unit is the yuan. As I've written before, the Chinese government can't risk revaluing its currency until world markets are more stable or it will risk driving Chinese exports back into a tailspin, which I estimate would result in another 5 million job losses. Far too many factories are running on the paper-thin margins that American companies like Target (TGT) and Wal-Mart (WMT) demand from their suppliers. An appreciation of the yuan would immediately put those factories out of business, just as many closed down when China appreciated the yuan 20% between 2005 and 2008.
Moreover, Krugman doesn't take into account the fact that rising labor costs are already helping fix the imbalance in the dollar-yuan exchange rate without an actual appreciation, and he fails to acknowledge that China's surplus is actually decreasing as China's domestic consumption grows. You don't have to change the exchange rate directly to make the yuan more fairly valued. Even Jim O'Neill, Goldman Sachs' chief economist, who has repeatedly criticized China's exchange rate policy, recently said that the yuan is no longer as underappreciated as it has been.
The reason? Rising labor costs and increasing Chinese consumption. In the last several months many provinces in manufacturing areas have raised the minimum wage and started to enforce the rules that companies must pay medical and social security costs for employees....
Posts
