Condom Chic

I was just sitting here mulling over excuses to not study corporate tax when this popped up in my RSS reader from Free exchange:

A Biden-esque statement from a Chinese official

Free exchange's RSS feed is frustratingly wonderful. The first line is always a snide response to the post title, yet that first line never appears in the actual post itself. In this case the post was a response to a quote in the Financial Times from Luo Ping, director-general at the China Banking Regulatory Commission:

Mr Luo, whose English tends toward the colloquial, added: “We hate you guys. Once you start issuing $1 trillion-$2 trillion [$1,000bn-$2,000bn] . . .we know the dollar is going to depreciate, so we hate you guys but there is nothing much we can do.”

Colloquial? When a Chinese official endearingly uses a phrase, "I hate you guys," popularized by Eric Cartman in a Churchill on democracy kinda way to describe the relative stability of US bonds, I'd say he's a comic genius.

The good news: the Chinese will keep buying our debt. Hey, we can't be expected to start increasing our savings rate over night. And if we did do something so drastic as increase our savings rate to, oh say, 5%, US consumer spending would plunge by $500 billion. Then we'd see just how deep a global recession could get.

Where was I? Ah yes! The first comment at that Free exchange post links to a story about condom recycling in China. 25 分/3 cents, is a pretty good deal for 10 hairbands, unless they're the base of used condoms. This naturally led me to a photo gallery of a Beijing fashion show to promote the use of condoms where all the clothes were made from, yes, condoms. I don't know if this is hilarious or disgusting: