Political Quotes

“I was necessarily absent this morning when we considered Senator Baucus's amendment to the debt limit increase. If I had been here, I would have supported the Baucus amendment. The Baucus amendment is clearly needed. The massive scale of other nations' accumulation of our debt has added another level of danger and complexity to our international economic relations. This is a two-way street. The tsunami of debt created by the policies of this administration has to go somewhere. China is one of the major purchasers of that debt. Japan, Great Britain, and others have major holdings, too. In the short term, that has soaked up a lot of our bonds, and helped to keep interest rates down. That is a good thing. However, that has kept the Chinese currency artificially low, and ours artificially high. So they can sell their products at a discount, and our exports are more expensive. That is a bad thing. Our trade deficit was a record $726 billion last year; $202 billion of that was our trade deficit with China alone. But as the rest of the world copes with the waves of U.S. debt, we are now all in the same leaky boat. There is just so much of our debt other nations want to hold. The more of it they accumulate, the closer we are to the day when they will not want any more. When that happens, slowly or rapidly, our interest rates will go up, the value of their U.S. bonds will drop, and we will all have big problems.…”