Is it possible that it may be to a growing extent the Chinese who are the ones lending large amounts of money to help the Western Central banks prop up our failing banking system?
See the US Treasury website, for example – http://www.ustreas.gov/tic/mfh.txt,
showing Japan as the biggest foreign owner of US treasury bonds, on a
declining scale, and China as the second biggest, rapidly catching up
and very soon to overtake Japan. (We in the UK are a distant – but
rapidly and massively growing – 3rd after these two giants, with the
rest of the world trailing behind.)
See recent analysis for China of the current crisis – “In the first
half of 2008 China’s GDP continued to grow at a double-digit
rate (10.4%), despite a few severe natural disasters that hit many parts
of the country really hard, including the snowstorms in south
China in January and the Sichuan earthquake in May. Therefore,
irrespective of the economic slowdown in the rest of the world,
China is still likely to propel its own economic growth and trade
at a rather ambitious pace. Thanks to limited exposure to US
subprime mortgages, most Chinese commercial banks will not be
critically impaired by the current crisis. ” [pdf]
See the journalistic reports that China is indeed so economically strong that its large investments in the West can nonetheless be comfortably written off…
Maybe they waited till after the Olympics before they really started to squeeze…?
STOP PRESS – Will Hutton’s comments are revealing and longer term. A relief?