The year 2012 will see a stream of new books in the patented Thomas Friedman “Oh My God the Chinese Are Eating Our Lunch with Environmentally Friendly Chopsticks” mold. Some will be more worthwhile than others. One book in particular, however, is sure to stand out, if only for the title: “Becoming China’s Bitch: And Nine More Catastrophes We Must Avoid Right Now.”
The author, Peter D. Kiernan, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, explains in the introduction that “it’s not a book about China exactly. It’s about how America got diverted and lost momentum, and a dragon leapt into the breach. It’s also about getting our mojo back.”
I spoke with him over the phone:
FP: When did you first realize we were in danger of becoming China’s bitch?
PK: When it first occurred to me was in 2008, as a card-carrying member of a discredited class, everyone in Wall Street had to re-think everything. We had gone through a 30 plus year bull market. We now had to wrestle with the idea of who was going to fund the 42 percent of our government that has to be borrowed. Whenever you depend on one major source of finance, if it’s too heavy in one area, it deserves a re-thinking.
We haven’t really thought clearly about this as a nation. It was a part of this re-thinking everything. We have a much greater co-dependency on China than we’d like to acknowledge. The book is not solely about China, but Becoming China’s Bitch is about the cost to our dithering.
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