OP-ED: “A Bailout Beijing Would Cheer,” by David Ignatius, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 20-26 October 2008.

ASIA: “Asia and the crisis: Here we go again; The world’s financial meltdown stirs uneasy memories across Asia,” The Economist, 18 October 2008.

ARTICLE: “Their Own Worst Enemy,” by James Fallows, The Atlantic, November 2008.

A bit much from Ignatius: “We are all Chinese now.”

Puh-leeze!

Hamilton isn’t spinning in his grave; Mao is.

Public-private partnerships may be “Confucian,” as Ignatius points out, but they are also very American. Go back and read your early history on how infrastructure got built in our new republic.

Cool part of op-ed is Ignatius describing what some have already dubbed, Bretton-Woods II, or the structural imbalance whereby Asian economies go surplus and we go deficit and they recycle through our bonds and T-bills.

For a long time I have called this “exporting security,” and the outsourcing of global security from Asia to the U.S. (along with Europe). Another way you can describe it is to say we’ve run an implicit Marshall Plan for rising Asia in the post-Cold War era: we consume our way to their rapid development.

Now, whatever you want to call it, that course has been run and we need to re-calibrate.

Thus the good timing for Great Powers.

I do want to see Ignatius’ movie, though: Crowe + DeCaprio + Ridley is—to me—just about perfect. I was sorry to see it do poorly in theaters, but the timing was bad.

No, I don’t expect Asia to step up as quickly as it should at this economic summit. There’s just too much fear left over from the Asian Flu, as the Economist points out.

It’s one of the reasons why China keeps underselling itself, as Fallows argues. That word came down from Deng himself when that whole revolution began.