Geithner to Chinese: Don't Worry, Trust Us; We'll Only Spend What We Need to Spend

After China expressed reservations about Obama's current spending habits, Little Timmy Geithner tried to reassure them by telling them, basically, not to worry and trust us. We'll stop spending whenever our economy stable:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says he has reassured China that the United States will take steps to address rising budget deficits once the economic recovery is firmly in place.

China has huge investments in the United States and has worried it could be undermined by U.S. budget deficits. Geithner says the Obama administration plans to reverse the spending of hundreds of billions of dollars devoted to stimulating the economy and propping up a teetering financial system.

I'm sure that was a huge relief to China, the country that holds most of our national debt in their hands. The real question is when will Obama and the Democrats feel that the economy is stable enough to stop. The whole point is speculative, at best. "Stable" is a relative term. Democrats' could drag this deficit spending bonanza as long as they see fit.

Chinese "Sex Workers" Get US Tax Money to Learn How to Drink

Here's an unique way to waste some of our money:

The National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAA), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), will pay $2.6 million in U.S. tax dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly on the job.

This is ridiculous on a few levels. First of all, what good will "drinking resposibly" do to curb HIV infection? You can't transmit the virus over a vodka martini. Maybe they should use the money to get the women out of prostitution.

Second, why are prostitutes in China getting our money. Are there prostitites in the US that might benefit from this give away?

I also curious what kind of "field observations" there will be.

Why does it take millions of dollars to teach hookers how to make a magarita and hold their liquor?

China's Moronic One-Child Policy Predictably Blows Up in Their Face

New Study Shows Extent of Gender Imbalance in China
By SHARON LAFRANIERE
Published: April 11, 2009

BEIJING - A bias in favor of male offspring has left China with 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls, creating "an imminent generation of excess men," a study released Friday said.

For the next twenty years, China will have increasingly more men than women of reproductive age, according to the paper published on-line by the British Medical Journal.

"Nothing can be done now to prevent this," the researchers said.

Chinese government planners have long known that the urge of couples to have sons was skewing the gender balance of the population. But the study by two Chinese university professors and a London researcher provides some of the first hard data on the extent and the factors contributing to the disparity.

In 2005 , they found, China had more than 1.1 million excess male births. There were 120 boys born for every 100 girls. This problem seems to surpass that of any other country, they said - a finding they wrote that was perhaps not surprising in light of China's one-child policy.

They blamed the imbalance almost entirely upon decisions by couples to abort female fetuses. The trend toward more male than female children intensified steadily after 1986, they said, as ultrasound tests and abortion became more available. "Sex selective abortion accounts for almost all the excess males," the paper said.

The researchers said the disparity was sharpest among one-to-four year olds, a sign that the worst imbalances among the adult population lie ahead. They also found greater distortion in provinces that allow rural couples a second child if the first is a girl or in cases of hardship.

Those couples were determined to ensure they had at least one son, they noted. Among children born second, there were 143 boys for 100 girls, the data showed.

The Chinese government is openly concerned "about the consequences of large numbers of excess men for social stability and security," the researchers said. But "although some imaginative and extreme solutions have been suggested," they wrote, China will have too many men for a generation to come.

They said enforcing the ban against sex-selective abortions could normalize the sex ratio in the future.

The study was conducted by Wei Xingzhu, a Zhejiang Normal University professor; Li Lu, a Zhejiang University professor, and Therese Hesketh, a University College London lecturer.


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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/world/asia/11china.html?ref=global-home

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My Thoughts

You know it's a slow news day when I start talking about China's one-child policy.

I wonder how the geniuses in the Chinese Communist government couldn't forsee this.

Geithner Opens Mouth, US Dollar Drops

Geithner 'open' to China proposal

Geithner, at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the U.S. is "open" to a headline-grabbing proposal by the governor of the China's central bank, which was widely reported as being a call for a new global currency to replace the dollar, but which Geithner described as more modest and "evolutionary." "I haven’t read the governor’s proposal. He’s a very thoughtful, very careful distinguished central banker. I generally find him sensible on every issue," Geithner said, saying that however his interpretation of the proposal was to increase the use of International Monetary Fund's special drawing rights -- shares in the body held by its members -- not creating a new currency in the literal sense.

"We’re actually quite open to that suggestion – you should see it as rather evolutionary rather building on the current architecture rather than moving us to global monetary union," he said.

"The only thing concrete I saw was expanding the use of the [special drawing rights]," Geithner said. "Anything he’s thinking about deserves some consideration."

The continued use of the dollar as a reserve currency, he added, "depends..on how effective we are in the United States...at getting our fiscal system back to the point where people judge it as sustainable over time."

President Obama flatly rejected the notion of a new global currency at last night's press conference.

UPDATE: Evidently sensing a gaffe, moderator Roger Altman told Geithner that it would be "useful" to retun to the question, and asked if he foresaw a change in the dollar's centrality.

"I do not," Geithner said, adding several forceful promises, including, "We will do what's necessary to say we're sustaining confidence in our financial markets."

By Ben Smith

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http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0309/Geithner_open_to_China_proposal.html?showall
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Dollar Declines on Geithner’s Comment on IMF Drawing Rights

By Ye Xie and Oliver Biggadike

March 25 (Bloomberg) -- The dollar declined against the euro after Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the U.S. is open to enlarging special drawing rights at the International Monetary Fund.

The U.S. currency pared losses after Geithner predicted the dollar will remain the world’s effective “reserve currency.” The special drawing rights are currency units valued against a composite of currencies.

“It’s a basket of currencies, and the dollar has the biggest weight in the basket,” said Brian Dolan, chief currency strategist at FOREX.com, a unit of online currency trading firm Gain Capital in Bedminster, New Jersey. “The dollar has the most to lose with the expansion of the basket.”

The dollar declined 0.7 percent to $1.3558 per euro at 10:55 a.m. in New York, from $1.3468 yesterday. The U.S. currency dropped 0.2 percent to 97.64 yen from 97.86. The euro increased 0.4 percent to 132.32 yen from 131.81.

Geithner commented in response to a question after a speech at a conference in New York today. He was asked to clarify earlier remarks that the U.S. would be “open” to expanding the IMF’s special drawing rights.

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http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aJSs_yxxpguc&refer=japan
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My Thoughts

Almost everytime Geithner opens his mouth something bad seems to happen. When he discussed his non-plan plan, the stock market tanks. This time he says that he's open to China's suggestion of getting rid of the US dollar and the dollar tanks. Obama needs to invest in a muzzle for poor Timmy.