PAULSON’S CHINA TRIP LEAVES BIG ISSUES UNRESOLVED
Andrew Jacobs
The New York Times, December 6, 2008
BEIJING — There was an agreement to make it easier for foreign banks to trade bonds in China. There were memorandums on energy conservation. And there was the creation of a formal partnership to encourage a Kansas town shattered by a tornado to share green reconstruction methods with an earthquake-devastated city in Sichuan Province.
For Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., the two days of economic dialogue with Chinese officials that ended Friday produced a modest stream of achievements, including pledges by both nations to spend $20 billion to help finance trade in developing countries.
Even if the marquee economic conference that Mr. Paulson helped establish in 2006 was supposed to be more about big ideas and less about deliverables, the pressure to come up with tangible successes has been hard to resist.
This year was no exception, and the jointly issued “fact sheet” listed five pages of agreements on issues like forest management, food safety, plug-in hybrid cars and offshore wind farms.
But the United States-China Strategic Economic Dialogue, as it is called, also left many large issues unresolved and served to highlight tensions between the world’s biggest economy and the world’s largest developing one.
For the Americans, they include efforts to open China’s financial sector to United States securities firms and longstanding tensions over government control of the yuan, whose weakness against the dollar has contributed to a yawning trade gap between the two countries.
For the Chinese, there were oblique criticisms that America’s profligate ways had sent the global economy into a tailspin and threatened China’s stability. Largely unspoken is the fact that the Chinese government has become the largest holder of United States Treasury securities, with about $600 billion of China’s savings invested in American debt.
(...) [artículo aquí]
Andrew Jacobs
The New York Times, December 6, 2008
BEIJING — There was an agreement to make it easier for foreign banks to trade bonds in China. There were memorandums on energy conservation. And there was the creation of a formal partnership to encourage a Kansas town shattered by a tornado to share green reconstruction methods with an earthquake-devastated city in Sichuan Province.
For Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., the two days of economic dialogue with Chinese officials that ended Friday produced a modest stream of achievements, including pledges by both nations to spend $20 billion to help finance trade in developing countries.
Even if the marquee economic conference that Mr. Paulson helped establish in 2006 was supposed to be more about big ideas and less about deliverables, the pressure to come up with tangible successes has been hard to resist.
This year was no exception, and the jointly issued “fact sheet” listed five pages of agreements on issues like forest management, food safety, plug-in hybrid cars and offshore wind farms.
But the United States-China Strategic Economic Dialogue, as it is called, also left many large issues unresolved and served to highlight tensions between the world’s biggest economy and the world’s largest developing one.
For the Americans, they include efforts to open China’s financial sector to United States securities firms and longstanding tensions over government control of the yuan, whose weakness against the dollar has contributed to a yawning trade gap between the two countries.
For the Chinese, there were oblique criticisms that America’s profligate ways had sent the global economy into a tailspin and threatened China’s stability. Largely unspoken is the fact that the Chinese government has become the largest holder of United States Treasury securities, with about $600 billion of China’s savings invested in American debt.
(...) [artículo aquí]
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment