Managing The Dragon

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner made a brief stop in Beijing on Thursday, meeting for 45 minutes with China Vice Premier Wang Qishan in a private room at Beijing Capital Airport. Although details of the discussion have not been released, the obvious purpose of the meeting was to discuss face to face whatever agreement […]

Zhou Xiaochuan, governor of the People’s Bank of China, used an appearance at the National People’s Congress to give the clearest indication in months that Beijing is preparing to abandon the peg to the US dollar that it informally introduced in mid-2008. He told a press conference that the currency peg was a “special measure” […]

It’s now official: the Hummer deal has been scuttled. The conventional wisdom from the very beginning has been that the Chinese government would never approve the sale of Hummer by General Motors to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. because it runs counter to current Chinese auto policy which is promoting smaller, more fuel efficient […]

In case you haven’t noticed, the deteriorating relationship between the United States and China is turning out to be the major story of 2010. Quite apart from tensions on trade and the currency, new issues are popping up every day, and old issues like Taiwan that have not been in the news for some time […]

The global economy is much more stable today than it was at this time last year, but that doesn’t make 2010 any easier to predict. In January 2009, the debate was all about numbers. Would China’s economy grow by 8 percent as the government was predicting, 7.2 percent as the World Bank concluded, or considerably […]

It’s hard to believe, but at this time last year, no one knew where the world was headed. Trillions of dollars of wealth had been wiped out by the global financial crisis that began in September 2008; once powerful banks, investment banks and insurance companies the world over had been reduced to financial cripples; General […]

Now that all of the state visits are over, Wen Jiabao, China’s premier, drew some pretty clear lines in the sand regarding China’s currency and climate change policies. Speaking at the conclusion of the EU-China summit in Nanjing, Wen said: “Some countries on the one hand want the renminbi to appreciate, but on the other […]

Dressed in Asian garb and smiling for the cameras, the leaders of the 21 nations that make up the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) looked as though they were at a love fest in Singapore this weekend. For those who cared to read between the lines, though, President Hu Jintao of China, the country whose importance […]

Bowing to pressure from organized labor, the Obama Administration has fired the first shot across the bow in what could potentially develop into a nasty conflict with China, America’s largest trading partner and the single largest investor in the U.S. economy. In the Opinion section of its weekend edition, The Wall Street Journal reported that: […]

It’s only been six months, but it seems like ages since 2008 finally gave way to 2009. Though uncertainty will always be part and parcel of economics and finance, it’s hard to remember a time when there was less clarity in global economics. By January, trillions of dollars of wealth had been wiped out by […]