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Our previous coverage of former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage speaking at Missouri Boys State last evening:
Richard Armitage at Missouri Boys State: via Twitter
Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage speaking at Missouri Boys State in Hendricks Hall on the campus of the University of Central Missouri.
....Question: ...I have two questions. My first one was, is that, as you know, a lot of what we sell, er, buy comes from China and Japan and the Asian countries. Uh, you can't really pick up anything without seeing 'made in China', Japan, Korea there. Do you think this affects anything at all, like our economy, or do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing? What are your thoughts?
Richard Armitage, former Deputy Secretary of State: That's the first one, what about the second question?
Question: And the second one was, what is Persepodas? You said that, uh, the Persians, when you cut them and bleed, they bleed Persepodas, or something like that, and we wanted to know what that was.
Richard Armitage: Okay. The question of, when we buy cheap goods from China, it's, used to be from Japan, not, not much anymore, theirs are kind of high tech goods. Uh, I don't think it bothers us much. We're not doing the manufacturing. Uh, we've benefited immensely of, uh, of the Chinese products that we were buying here before. Now exports are way down.
What does have a big effect on our economy is the number of treasury bills that China holds. China, Japan hold enormous amounts of our treasury. I think the image that you should have of the three of us is of three people in sort of a circle, each with a gun at the other's head. If China pulls out their t-bills our economy falters terribly, but their bills are not worth very much. The same is true of Japan. So, they kind of have to keep us rocking along to keep the value in the treasury bills. So, I think at this point in time, uh, we're still all, in the words of, uh, Ben Franklin, gonna have to hang together or else we'll hang separately on this...
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