Word: geithners
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...Geithner concluded his maiden journey to China as Treasury Secretary on Tuesday by meeting the two most powerful men in the nation that is the biggest creditor of the United States: President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. The man whose name now graces dollar bills in the United States was, in effect, meeting his bankers. But if those two pressed the Treasury Secretary about whether their government's huge investments in the U.S. are safe - the way some of their colleagues "grilled" Fisher, Geithner's former colleague on the Federal Reserve Board - it's a secret. Indeed...
...messages go, it doesn't get much clearer than that. But Geithner has known all along that there were two critical first steps the U.S. had to take in order to begin the process of reassuring its creditors. It had to demonstrate that it had a grip on the banking crisis - that financial Armageddon was not at hand - and it needed to show the world that a broad, macroeconomic turnaround wasn't too far down the road. Geithner is loathe to talk publicly about market behavior, but Treasury officials believe that a tightening of credit-market spreads shows an improvement...
...just yesterday - fortuitous timing for Geithner - both the U.S. and China reported economic data that buoyed equity markets on both sides of the Pacific. In China, the monthly purchasing manager's index for manufacturing was stronger than expected, showing "for the first time that policy is really gaining traction [in China]," says Eric Fishwick, head of economic research at CLSA Asia Pacific Markets in Hong Kong. At the same time, in the U.S., data showed that personal income in April rose 0.5%, an encouraging number. On a day when General Motors, once the world's largest industrial corporation, declared bankruptcy...
...Thus, as he headed into his key meetings in China, Geithner actually had an ever so slight wind at his back. He acknowledged as much, in fact, upon greeting Prime Minister Wen: "At the time we met in New York [last autumn]," Geithner told him, "it was a time of great panic. But we are happy to see small signs of recovery...
...welcomed Geithner warmly in his public remarks; the chill in China's rhetoric of just a couple of months ago is now gone, as is any notion that Beijing will stop buying huge amounts of Treasury debt anytime soon. In fact, in March, China's direct holdings of U.S. Treasury securities alone (excluding so-called agency debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) rose $23.7 billion, to reach a new record of $768 billion, according to preliminary U.S. data, making China far and away America's biggest creditor...