Stilltitled

I worry about details. We will be watching you very carefully.
—Yu Yongding, in the China Daily interview with Geithner

I wish to tell the U.S. government: ‘Don’t be complacent and think there isn’t any alternative for China to buy your bills and bonds’. The euro is an alternative. And there are lots of raw materials we can still buy. Yes, some people say the euro is very weak. Okay, weak is good, we’ll buy very cheap….The borrower should keep their promises. The U.S. should be a responsible country.
—Yu Yongding, continued

If the U.S. can find a way to protect China’s assets, America’s standing here will increase. We are not going to return to the good old days of 2006. We are going to promote the creation of a new world order.
—Yu Yongding in an interview Monday

You have established good working relationships with your Chinese colleagues and you are committed to increasing China-U.S. cooperation in tackling the international financial crisis. I appreciate that.
—President Hu Jintao at the Great Hall of the People

In the short term I don’t think we can find another currency to replace the US dollar. The US dollar is the main currency because their economy is number one in terms of competitiveness, in terms of innovation…We’ve had SDRs for many years but everybody knows they don’t work so well. People worry about US dollars very much because of the imbalances in the current account but that has been the case for many years – they have had a deficit in the current account since the very beginning of the 1970s.
—Guo Shuqing, chairman of China Construction Bank and former head of the country’s foreign exchange administrator, on 1 June 2009

It’s very difficult at the moment because there are still so many uncertainties. We are not very interested on expanding our business in developed countries because the market is limited and growth potential is not there because of over-banking.
—Guo Shuqing continues in an FT interview on the first

This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. … All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.
—Ronald Reagan, 1982, on signing into law the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act

The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain, as I said, was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe…the fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers’ money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst.
—Krugman

I hope Geithner’s visit can soothe our nerves. The Chinese public is worried about the safety of its foreign- exchange reserves.
—Yu Yongding

Treasuries are still a buy and you can’t explain that from the macro economic perspective alone.
— Mickael Benhaim, head of global bonds at Pictet & Cie Banquiers in Geneva, $32b AUM

The Chinese public is worried about the safety of its foreign-exchange reserves. If America fails to adjust its economy by increasing its saving rate and reducing its current account deficit another financial crisis triggered by a dollar crisis could be inevitable…Geithner can show us some arithmetic. We need to know how the U.S. government can achieve this objective…The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve not only has expanded like mad but is also ridden with ‘rubbish’ assets.
—Yu Yongding

I do not know whether there will be enough demand for new issuances and hence I am worried about the direction of the prices of US government securities.
—Yu Yongding

Prospects for the US dollar and US Treasuries do not look good at the moment, and even worse in the long run.
—Wang Jian, Secretary General of the China Society of Macroeconomics

Expertise Modeling for Matching Papers with Reviewers, David Mimno, Andrew McCallum. Presented at the New Directions in Text Analysis conference, sponsored by the Eric M. Mindich Conference on Experimental Social Science

These events usually begin when the executives gather in the Oval Office, where they experience certain Enhanced Negotiating Techniques.
—David Brooks on Public / Private negotiations

The Treasury is issuing a lot of money. The market is beginning to wonder who is going to be buying these bonds.
—Bill Gross