I hope no one else thinks this is a good idea. The problem isn't corporate control of government stopped this but the fact it would do so much damage to the American economy and maybe start a trade war.
It would absolutely start a trade war, that America would lose very quickly. The incorrect assumption here is that America has more to gain than lose from doing that, when such couldn't be further from the truth. America is temporarily riding on a fake consumer driven economy supported by the cheapest debt in world history and cheap imports from other countries like China; emphasis on temporary. Our ability to rapidly scale up domestic manufacturing is non-existent, so in the midst of a serious trade war, nearly every single thing Americans buy would skyrocket in price and decimate the already tapped-out consumer, leading to millions of laid-off service sector workers.
This is going to happen anyway, as China and others can increasingly afford their own cheap goods and don't need to export them to us, and the days of cheap debt are coming to an end very soon. It would just accelerate the erosion of what's left of America's economic fantasy. And none of this even touches on the dumping of US Govt. junk paper by a country like China, which would collapse the economy instantly into either an Argentina / Venezuela style inflation nightmare (as the Fed has to print ever larger sums to keep the government solvent), or a Greece slash & burn scenario.
"Why hasn’t China “nuked” us? If Beijing sold Treasury securities in massive quantities, it would cause a panic, but the world’s deep markets would quickly adjust. The Chinese, we should remember, would get back dollars. Because they are doing this to undermine America, they would have to either buy hard assets or convert the proceeds into other currencies. As a practical matter, China’s deficit-plagued central government needs the income so most of the funds would go into interest-bearing instruments denominated in euros, pounds, francs, and yen.
The euro, pound, franc, and yen would obviously soar in value, so Brussels, London, Bern, and Tokyo would have to go out into the markets to rebalance their currencies. The only practical way to rebalance would be to buy . . . dollars.
So why don’t the Chinese go nuclear? They know that in a short period calm would return to the markets, America’s debt would end up held by its friends, and they would be stuck with a wide variety of assets their managers had shunned in the first place."
