capitalism with a lower case c
in other news, the jets had an iffy draft. They got two starters, but traded up for them and thus lost precious additional picks.
along with “the office”, i have been (once again) watching “the shield”. both shows are great, but the shield is a bit overwhelming in its intensity. I don’t watch 24, but i imagine it is similar, except the shield is much better acted, more realistic, and has nobody named kiefer.
below you can find two charts of foreign countries who own u.s. security bonds, which is how our national debt is financed. in 2000, when george bush took over, we owed roughly $1,000,000,000,000 (that 1 trillion), the top two countries were japan at 317 billion and china at 60 billion. flash forward to february of this year and debt is well over 2 trillion (that’s an increase of 1,000 billions), with japan almost doubling to 617 billion, and china increasing their holdings by 5X to 416 billion. I have been reading “the coming china wars” (which is horrible, but more on that another time), and what is clear is the china does not care about the prosperity of the u.s. and will leverage the debt in their own interest (probably at our expense). below is a quick chart showing the debt and how it will look if it continues how it is going (only four countries included, which includes a conglomeration of “oil producing countries”). sorry for the poor quality, but blogger auto-formats it. i also projected out the data using an exponential trend line (which seemed appropriate). by 2010, just three years away, china will be the largest owner of u.s treasury bonds.
http://www.treas.gov/tic/mfh.txt
http://www.treas.gov/tic/mfhhis01.txt
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