China criticises US money policy

Anyone wondering what President Obama will face when he arrives in South Korea on Wednesday for a global financial summit meeting need look no further than an announcement by China’s leading state-endorsed rating agency, which downgraded the United States’ credit rating on Tuesday — and provocatively questioned American leadership of the global economy.

Anyone wondering what President Obama will face when he arrives in South Korea on Wednesday for a global financial summit meeting need look no further than an announcement by China’s leading state-endorsed rating agency, which downgraded the United States’ credit rating on Tuesday — and provocatively questioned American leadership of the global economy.

HT Image

The agency cited the Federal Reserve’s decision to pump more money into the United States’ economy and warned of Washington’s “deteriorating debt repayment capability” and “the serious defects in the United States economic development and management model,” which it predicted would lead to “fundamentally lowering the national solvency.”

In the rest of the world, the United States is still the strongest of credit risks, and the Chinese downgrade is not expected to have much real impact. Nonetheless, the sharply worded attack from the country that is buying billions of dollars in American debt each month was just the latest rhetorical assault on the United States, as officials from China to Germany to Brazil suggest that Washington’s addiction to debt has greatly diminished its credibility.

But those critics, mostly countries that fear that recent American policy will devalue the dollar and undercut their competitiveness, do not appear poised to offer an alternative to an economic order that has been led by the United States since the end of World War II, or to the role the dollar has played for decades as the de facto world gold standard.

The Chinese, who have protested that the Federal Reserve is trying to unilaterally manipulate the dollar for the purpose of creating jobs at home, have been accused of doing exactly that for years — the root of many of the world’s economic tensions today, in the eyes of the United States.