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Comment by astaunton | Hacker News Reader

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Approx 70% of American bonds are owned by Chinese companies. So if America puts the squeeze on the Chinese, they may cash in their bonds....since Mr. Trump feels he needs to upset Asia (making friends with North Korea) and feels the need to upset the EU, i doubt anyone will be plugging that gap

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Your debt figures are not correct.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080615/china...

Second, China needs that debt to be able to manage it's own currency. And though the Fed is not supposed play games like international currency war ... it will. The Fed and the USD are well poised to soak up any problems that China tries to play with USD.

It's also a game of confidence: do USD holders worldwide think that China can sink the USD with a little bit of war? Or is the global petrodollar resilient? Given the numbers and ratios ... it's clear that China probably won't win, cred remains in the USD etc.. So - it would have to be a coordinated shock - if there were both economic problems in the US, and dollar problems, and shocks in some other way and then China started playing games ... well that's something else.

i never said China would win, my point was the ripple effect it will have. These games could have major impact for the smaller mom&pop companies in both China and America. So in an effort to re-vitalize businesses it may in fact cause a lot of them to fold (as even medium businesses rely on the smaller one to provide a service)

That debt is the reason the US has a trade deficit with China. China has no economic interest in holding US debt with the exception of funding purchases of its own goods. This is also in line with the twin deficits hypothesis.

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