Globalism's darker side.

With the current financial meltdown, the world is starting to see the darker side of being so economically intertwined with one another.  Hong Kong's banks are beginning to feel the pinch of American markets crashing.  Apparently, Chinese bank customers have even lower confidence in their banking systems than Americans are beginning to: for the second time in the past ten years, bank customers are lining up to withdraw their savings from the banks.

That hasn't happened in the United States since 1932.  Not really.  Not en masse.  And not with every bank.

Consequently, China has decided to stop allowing their banks to lend money (i.e., invest in) to American banks.  I assume that this is a measure to try to keep their economy from tanking with ours.  

Unfortunately for them, that's not the only way theirs is tangled with ours.  They sell more goods to the United States than to pretty much any other nation in the world.  And, the worse our economy gets, the less goods our people buy as their incomes either fall or stay static while prices rise.  The less the American consumer buys, the less money flows back into China.  In other words, China is, like the American government, doing the wrong thing at the wrong time to try to stave off the problems that both economies face.

That is, of course, an assumption that this is only about trying to prevent their economy from tanking.  There's no guarantee that it's not an attempt to sink ours while trying to keep theirs more or less afloat.  They are, after all, more business partners than allies and friends.  And honestly, they're more our competitors than anything.

Then again, I could be paranoid.