Hillary Clinton presses China to keep buying US debt

From Wsws.org

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concluded her weeklong Asian tour Sunday with an explicit appeal to the Beijing government to keep up its purchases of US treasury notes or risk the onset of an even deeper economic crisis engulfing China and the US itself.

On her first overseas trip since being tapped by President Barack Obama, her former rival for the Democratic nomination, as his chief foreign policy representative, Clinton assumed the role of an official high-pressure bond saleswoman.

While the tour also took her to Japan, South Korea and Indonesia, the focus was clearly on economic relations between the US and China.

Her aim was to convince China to keep investing its foreign exchange reserves in US treasury securities in order to help finance the bailout of failing US banks and pay for the $787 billion US stimulus package. The US treasury has indicated it must raise nearly $500 billion in the first quarter of this year alone.

In an interview on China's Dragon TV just before concluding her trip and returning to Washington Sunday, Clinton warned that if the US economy collapsed China would pay a steep price as well. "It would not be in China's interest if we were unable to get our economy moving," she told her interviewer.

"Our economies are so intertwined," she said on the talk show. "The Chinese know that in order to start exporting again to its biggest market ... the United States has to take some drastic measures with the stimulus package. We have to incur more debt."