• Another Misstep On Obama’s New Battle Front

There is little argument that the concluding G-20 meeting has been an international beat-up slugfest on America. Effective and substantial Strategic Planning is critical in the success of any significant endeavor. It should be ever-present when addressing the country’s economic long-term health.

Obama and his advisors fumbled once again on the international scene. Unfortunately, this time the fumble was on an economically critical battlefront.

The Fed continued its artificial manipulation of the economy by announcing that at the stroke of a pen filled with dollar printing ink called the Quantitative Easement Quill, a tidy $600 billion will be added to the float. While there is urgency in taking decisive action to stimulate hiring across the country, The Fed’s bond purchase program could have waited announcement another few days, particularly since it will be implemented over a very extended period. The Fed may in fact decide to scale back on the total amount depending on how the economic activity trend reacts.

Currency fluctuations have not been the source of the current economic crisis, but have been the outcome of such things as the overwhelming export of never to return jobs to inexpensive-labor-gives-us-cheap-products countries, AND we can artificially inflate national wealth by enforcing the financing of a home-for-each-citizen program.

Announcing the easement (read: circumlocutive euphemism for Inflative) just prior to G-20 gave China a major pass at the meeting, and in fact, pushed it to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with America’s “friends” pounding on America. The G-20 meeting should have been more about China’s maintenance of a weak Renminbi, and protectionism, rather than about the U.S.’s wholesale weakening of King Dollar.

The Bernanke announcement resulted in a verbal assault on America by everyone from China to Germany. America’s defense was left to representation by a President not familiar with things economic. It isn’t even clear that China’s real relative exchange rate hasn’t appreciated recently given the rapidly rising prices within China. Just like The Fed, whose complete independence from Congressional control or real oversight enables it to go wherever it wishes to go, so too China will ignore all bended-knee implorations from Obama and Geithner.

Now to make matters doubly difficult, the Administration is shouting into the deaf ears of its trading partners and geopolitical friends. China will continue on its merry way, and it has firmly confirmed that it would completely ignore the Administration when it admonished Obama as he went out the door with a, “Don't make others take the medicine for your disease,” (Yu Jianhua, a director general of China's Ministry of Commerce). The opportunity presented by the G-20 meeting to coagulate forces to pressure China is now passed, and the situation has been made worse for America.

This Administration really must take some classes on Effective Negotiating.

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