Pod-cast induced rants...

As I listen to pod-casts...

• We have a strange idea of what it is to be rich...our houses got more expensive, as did oil and gold and fuel and food...didn't the dollar just fall? Measuring the cost of living via consumer electronics is silly! I can't eat my iPod (not that I haven't tried).
• Yelling at China about how they "rig" their currency strikes me as disingenuous. You only need to have one multi-course dinner for two with a lot of beer for $3 in Beijing to realize that no adjustment in currency is going to undo the huge cost of labor advantage that China has. The RMB could go up 50% and we wouldn't get our factories back.
• Countries don't "rig" their currencies with willpower (ask South America). China has earned the right to do whatever they want with their currency by having about a gajillion billion trillion dollars in reserve. Having them release that reserve would be a lot worse than the "low" price of their currency is now. China does what they do via market muscle - if they didn't have the muscle to back it up, they'd get taken apart by speculators.

The deteriorating domestic opinion of our relationship with China is what worries me most. I think there's only two ways forward: the Chinese population consuming more, fueling growth and balancing trade deficits (and destroying the environment, plus they are not trending toward increased consumption) or we could have a trade war that would remove the largest potential upside for our local economy (exports to other growing economies) while making everything more expensive at the same time. Plus, who would we borrow money from?