[auvrw]

the farm in my family indirectly exports some crops to China (as in crops go to a port which takes them to China): the import/export relationship is not one-way. it (China) is a large country by population, and while that's got to be one of the factors driving economic growth --- steel industry and various forms of tech and manufacturing (rise of ODMs, etc.) --- now that the government is increasingly (indirectly) opting into the IMF, there are also a lot of people to feed.

debt can be viewed as another word for "relationship."

and it's cool in some ways, yet in other ways kind of a shame: debt from the United States is, to some degree, buying into the military-industrial complex. valuing China's money is, in part, condescending to a rather selective perspective on human rights. hopefully the guanxi flows to the best in each rather than the worst.

i don't pretend to understand the international economy. however, with the sort of logistics enabled by modern communications technology, i suspect that it's a lot more feasible to completely pack one large barge with a variety of goods than it used to be, making for lower-cost shipping than one might expect.

[yuhong]

I am talking about all goods not just food, and not claiming there are zero exports either. And yes, part of the reason we got off the gold standard was military spending. Even now I like to mention that the more NSA/FBI spends, the more money is printed using government debt.