Does this mean we're not invited to your birthday party?

China is apparently not happy about the soaring U.S. national debt:

LUO PING, director-general at the China Banking Regulatory Commission, takes the increasingly contentious relationship between America and China to a new level during a speech in New York:

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.”

China bought trillions of dollars of U.S. treasury bonds, in order to keep their currency cheap, so that we would buy their stuff. They did this knowing that those treasury bonds were likely to depreciate in the future, causing the People's Bank of China to take huge capital losses. Now that the inevitable is happening, they're blaming us? Who bought the stuff in the first place?

It just goes to show that, no matter what we do, China is unlikely to be our best buddy. When things go wrong, and the Chinese government needs to stop its people from taking to the streets, who else can it blame but America? So we'd be pretty foolish to base our policies on the hope of "staying on China's good side," wouldn't we?

Plus: more inflation-o-phobia from the confused pundits of the conservative media.