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this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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I'm actually lost, like the racist/classist peasants remark aside, what is he even trying to say here? Who in the US is borrowing money from China to buy things from China ???
China buys US treasury bonds, which are sort of like loaning the US money, since they pay out interest. Except that the reason why China does this in the first place is because they get too many US dollars from selling the US so much shit. And because they can't use those dollars to buy much from the US in return because the US doesn't produce very much that China wants or needs, they "loan" those dollars back to the US by buying bonds.
In short: China has more dollars than they can use to buy real goods so they just basically use them to "buy" more dollars. So Vance's logic is backwards here, it's actually China that gives the US a ton of stuff and in return gets glorified IOU papers.
China should be the ones calling it unfair. It's the US that's leaching off of productive economies like China (and Europe, before we decided to commit economic Seppuku by cutting ourselves off from cheap energy and thereby destroying our productive industries).
That's wild, wow.
Yeah it's a total scam. The US can just print infinite dollars while other countries give them actual physical goods. And they have the gall to complain that they're the ones being taken advantage of!
So fuck it, let them impose all the tariffs they want, tariffs are ultimately paid for by the end consumer anyway, and in the meantime they'll just be accelerating the process of global de-dollarization.
China will find other buyers. There's no shortage of demand for manufactured goods in the world, and a lot of countries have real tangible goods and resources that they can offer China in return (win-win).
But the US won't find another China to make all their shit (especially since they're just putting tariffs on not just China but every country that sells the US loads of shit), and they won't bring back manufacturing to the US either, that's structurally impossible.
I keep wondering if it's a thing where Trump is expecting China to blink and he keeps raising the stakes, thinking he'll get them to bend the knee, not realizing that they can take it a lot more than the US can. I know there are other theories floating around that have a real strategy behind them, like decoupling from China to do a hot war or to re-industrialize or something, but I don't know, even if strategic, it all seems pretty apple pie in the sky from the US's end. It comes across to me like the actions of an entity that feels cornered, with the attitudes of an entity that is used to being king, that has yet to come to terms with its decline.
I don't want to have unfounded optimism about it. I imagine the US can still do a lot of damage militarily across the world, at least in the short term. But the "soft power" part seems to be going increasingly in the shredder.