Generally speaking, I think I agree with you on all points…
I wrote this the way I did for a couple of reasons…. I wrote a piece just a couple days ago about how much we buy from China, and I intended this piece to be the other side of that coin; to talk about how much they buy from us.
You indicated that you were wondering why I wrote the first third of the article. It was as a set up for the second and third thirds. I wanted to stress that this is how everyone thinks of international trade: you send them dollars, and they can use them to either buy your things or trade those dollars with other countries so someone else buys your things. As a result, your money gets spent on your things. That’s the theory… And it’s the reason why so many politicians and economists don’t worry about trade deficits… They truly believe that the money comes back home to another purchase, so another American sell something, so it all evens out in the end.
The purpose of the rest of my article was to explain why that is not a full picture. I wanted to talk about the other, non-goods oriented, purchases that a foreign country can make with their international trade profits.
I think there are a lot of Americans, who don’t realize how China is buying up American businesses, American farmland, American, residential and commercial properties, etc., etc. I think that most Americans know what they see every day: they see goods made in China, sitting on their store shelves, and it really horrifies them. But they don’t realize how much else China is buying up, all over our country.
So I may have failed in communicating that point… But that was my goal, anyway.
I had a friend explain that very succinctly once. We send China paper (dollars), they sent us durables. Sounds like a bargain, but it’s not the only consideration.
Your article was good. This is a difficult subject to succinctly write about. Books don’t do it justice.