For years, Americans have been fulminating about China and its policy toward currency. While many of the debates are technical and laden with econo-speak, they boil down to the simple conviction that China is unfairly manipulating its currency to keep it undervalued against the dollar. The result is to give China unfair advantages in trade - flooding the US with cheap goods, hurting labor wages world-wide, and accumulating massive surpluses in the process. That view is again articulated by Paul Krugman in today's New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/opinion/23krugman.html?ref=opinion) which ends with the firm statement: "Something must be done about China's currency."
The economic relationship between China and the United States is the defining issue of our day. While debates over health care are vital to American society, and while challenges ranging from Iran to Afghanistan to North Korea are real, nothing will determine the arc of the coming decades - or will shape domestic life and prosperity in the United States - more than the emergence of China as a global economic superpower unrivalled except by America.
The rise of China is hardly a secret, but because it is a complex economic that is constantly evolving, it gets less attention than hot-button issues. Absent a real crisis between the two, the relationship is more about the flow of capital and the nature of global business than it is about heated battles inside the Beltway or on Main Street. And while the rise of China and America's increased dependency on Chinese loans to fund its deficits certainly generates anxiety, it's mostly amorphous barring some specific issue to focus it.
How that relationship came to be is the subject of my new book, Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends On It. While this economic fusion has taken more than two decades to evolve, with the crisis of the past year, it has become both a tighter embrace and one more fraught with tension. It's to the credit of both governments - for now - that those tensions have not boiled over.
In the 1800s immigrants from Germany and other mid-European countries flocked to cities like Cincinnatti, Detroit, Milwaukee and St. Louis. They built many things including great breweries, like Strohs, Blatz, Miller, Schlitz, Pabst, Falstaff and a thousand lesser ones. The greatest brewery of them all was Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis. I went to high school just 10 blocks from the 100 square block Busch brewery complex in St. Louis. If the breeze was just right, the smell of hops would blow in and engulf our classroom. It was a reassuring smell. It meant union jobs at solid middle class wages with great benefits that had been won thanks to strong unions and a paternalistic management. Anheuser-Busch, then & now, was the cornerstone of St. Louis.
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