[bodi]

I like patterns too. For example have you ever noticed China artificially props up the US economy via bonds/debt/investment and in return has flagrantly been allowed to steal pretty much every byte of US IP, both from the private sector and defense with zero pushback from our "intelligence" community, legislature, and only a hand wavey stop it from the Obama admin?

You still like patterns?

[dang]

Would you please not take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar? That's a violation both of the letter (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and spirit of this site.

[rdlecler1]

China has to put that money somewhere. Repatriate it and the yuan inflates destroying it’s pricing advantage. But buy USD and the greenback inflates in value and simultaneously drives monetary expansion with low interest rates. It’s in China’s commercial interest to buy treasuries. For the same reason, dumping the greenback would inflate the yuan-USD pair which would effectively tariff themselves.

[adventured]

> You still like patterns?

I like patterns, do you have some?

> China artificially props up the US economy via bonds/debt/investment

I don't believe you can support that claim. The US economy is far larger than the Chinese economy and far wealthier. The US consumer is far wealthier and far larger than the Chinese consumer. That also includes the US equity markets being far larger and the US bond markets being far larger. Further, US manufacturing is also not dramatically smaller than China's manufacturing sector and their manufacturing has already peaked.

China's holdings of US treasuries and US debt in general is entirely trivial. It's so small now the Fed could wipe it out with a modest round of QE and the dollar would hardly notice (especially since the dollar is very strong right now). It becomes more trivial by the day as China's holdings have been stagnant for many years, the US economy continues to grow larger in real terms, and the US Government's debt continues to expand (reducing China's relative share; their relative share has plunged over the past decade).

Since late 2009 / early 2010, China's US treasury holdings have not net expanded. In inflation adjusted terms, they've contracted considerably (by at least 20-25%). In that time the US economy has added an economy the size of Germany + France (about ~$7 trillion non-adjusted).

China is less critical to the US today, than at any other time in the past decade. That is especially true given their imports of US goods are not very considerable and have not expanded in about eight years (a time during which the US added ~$5.x to $6 trillion to its GDP, even further reducing China's real import contribution value to the US economy).

[bodi]

So its even worse, our leaders gave them the crown jewels and got nothing in return you say?

[adventured]

That hinges on a very outlandish, entirely unsupported conspiracy theory that you floated in your initial post: that the US Government is intentionally allowing China to steal all the IP in question.

The politicians in DC obviously love the idea of debasing their sole superpower status and their global power that goes with it. They like that notion so much, they've never been known to launch wars on the other side of the planet, commit coups, abuse sanctions, abuse their global intelligence / espionage position, or use any other such tactics in the post WW2 era to continue that position of power. So they'll just hand it over to China on a silver platter through vast, intentional IP transfer. More likely, there is a combination of political superpower naivety (persistently overestimating their ability to control China over the past two decades) and incompetence at work.

[gscott]

Dead on!