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Those are strange metrics of success you chose: number of cars produced annually, amount of public debt held. I'd have gone with GDP, military strength, set of
by carboncopy 11y ago
Those are strange metrics of success you chose: number of cars produced annually, amount of public debt held.
I'd have gone with GDP, military strength, set of advantageous alliances, or some other measure of economic, military, or political power.
- jcoffland 11y agoYou read it wrong. It's cash in hand not public debt they have more of.
- carboncopy 11y agoNo, I read it right. It's American public debt they hold. They don't have 1 trillion dollars in cash sitting in a vault. They are holding U.S. Treasury bonds. And again, I don't understand why having 1 trillion dollars in a reserve bank is a useful measure of economic power. The Chinese economy has a GDP of $10tn compared with the U.S. economy of $17tn. That is an example of a meaningful metric of power. ^^^ the parent commenter edited his entry after I submitted my original comment, which changes the relevance of my comment.
- jcoffland 11y agoThey have $3.9T worth of cash reserves sitting in a vault in addition to holding over $1T in US debt.
- khuey 11y agoNo, they don't. There's only 1.4 trillion dollars in circulation. http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm http://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm
- jcoffland 11y agoNot all of their cash reserves are denominated in US dollars.
- khuey 11y agoThere's around 5 trillion US dollars worth of hard currency in the world. http://gizmodo.com/5995301/how-much-money-is-there-on-earth http://gizmodo.com/5995301/how-much-money-is-there-on-earth 80% of it is not sitting in a vault in China.
- StreamBright 11y agoI think it is more like economic long term insurance than power.
- cylinder 11y agoChina's alliances are with the youngest regions with big growth potential - much of Africa, Asia, Iran, and now central Asia and Latin America. US has hitched its wagon to the declining western Europe.
- noir_lord 11y ago> has hitched its wagon to the declining western Europe. We are declining? I wish someone had told me.