Mish has an excellent look at just how, well, irresponsible China and other nation’s are being about printing money to pump up the economy and concludes thusly:
Don’t Mistake Printing For A Sustainable Recovery
It is a mistake to equate Chinese, US, and Japanese printing for any kind of sustainable recovery.
As noted in Gold And The Watched Pot Theory, “Every country wants to grow by ramping up exports in a world of decreasing consumer demand. To achieve that end, every country wants its currency to be weaker against every other currency. Of course that is logically impossible. Besides, the US consumer is tapped out. European consumers are tapped out as well. And tapped out or not, the Japanese consumer just does not want to buy.”
Neither the G-20 nor G-7 did anything to address the massive global imbalances. Something critical is going to blow sky high, when and what remains to be seen.
I agree – and I still figure it for around March. Be that as it may, we’ve got to stop thinking that Chinese growth (mostly fictional, these days) will pull us out of recession or that we can export our way to wealth. The only way we can get rich, again, is to start creating wealth – making, mining and growing our own stuff out of our own resources using our own labor.
Labor and materials are, at bottom, the only wealth there is – we’re 300 million people sitting on 3 million square miles of the richest land on earth…we don’t lack for anything, other than a government willing to get the job done. Oh, and sound money would be nice, too – back to the gold standard we should go…some people worry what this will do to our export trade. I say: who cares? We’ve got a big enough market here at home to absorb far more than we’re currently producing…lets worry about exporting after we’ve satisfied our domestic needs as much as possible.
We can’t borrow or print our way out of this – we can only work our way out.
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