Cross-posted at River Twice Research.

For years, Americans have been fulminating about China and its policy toward currency. While many of the debates are technical and laden with econo-speak, they boil down to the simple conviction that China is unfairly manipulating its currency to keep it undervalued against the dollar. The result is to give China unfair advantages in trade - flooding the US with cheap goods, hurting labor wages world-wide, and accumulating massive surpluses in the process. That view is again articulated by Paul Krugman in today's New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/opinio n/23krugman.html?ref=opinion) which ends with the firm statement: "Something must be done about China's currency."

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Cross-posted at River Twice Research.

The economic relationship between China and the United States is the defining issue of our day. While debates over health care are vital to American society, and while challenges ranging from Iran to Afghanistan to North Korea are real, nothing will determine the arc of the coming decades - or will shape domestic life and prosperity in the United States - more than the emergence of China as a global economic superpower unrivalled except by America.

The rise of China is hardly a secret, but because it is a complex economic that is constantly evolving, it gets less attention than hot-button issues. Absent a real crisis between the two, the relationship is more about the flow of capital and the nature of global business than it is about heated battles inside the Beltway or on Main Street. And while the rise of China and America's increased dependency on Chinese loans to fund its deficits certainly generates anxiety, it's mostly amorphous barring some specific issue to focus it.

How that relationship came to be is the subject of my new book, Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends On It. While this economic fusion has taken more than two decades to evolve, with the crisis of the past year, it has become both a tighter embrace and one more fraught with tension. It's to the credit of both governments - for now - that those tensions have not boiled over.

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This post is about the many ways in which Wall Street is about to do what they've always done to us: game the system for their own advantage.

It's what they do. As the old question goes: "Why do you think they get the big bucks?"

But, first, a little background...

There are a ton of extremely valid reasons why our government is engaging in the biggest giveaway of all time to the status quo (a/k/a Wall Street).

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My Senator, Norm Coleman, was sworn in on January 7, 2003, just before the start of the Iraq War, when the price of oil was $31.08 per barrel. On July 21, 2008 the price of oil had risen to $131.04 a barrel, $100 higher. That's an increase of 320% in five and a half years. My Congressman, John Kline, began his career in congress at the same time, and like Norm, he still serves.

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This Bud is for Big Oil, War Profiteers & Europeans, Middle-Class Americans Lose Again

The takeover of American icon Anheuser-Busch by Belgian Brewer InBev, a company that barely anyone had heard of 5 years ago, is another example of how middle-class Americans are paying dearly for the failed war in Iraq.  Simply put, the result of the war is sky high oil prices, a major inflationary pressure, and the worst economy in a generation.  In the process the dollar has dropped like a stone.  Imagine what the real estate crash has done to home values in a world economic context -- given dropping property values and the dropping dollar, many homes have declined in the neighborhood of 50%, ouch!  Call me a whiner but it's the truth.

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