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Washington
Post...
Biden
to Chinese: We’ll control debt
By Keith B. Richburg
Monday August 22, 2011
Vice
President Joe Biden said, “The
United States has never defaulted and never will default.”
BEIJING
— On the final stop of his four-day
China trip, Vice President Joe Biden sought to assure a university
audience
that the United States will come to grips with its debt problem, and he
blamed
a vocal faction of the Republican Party for the failure to reach a deal.
“We
do have to deal with the deficit,
we will deal with it,” Biden told the audience at Sichuan University,
in the
city of Chengdu.
“We
made some significant progress,
but not the progress we should have made and will make,” Biden said,
referring
to the last-minute deal between the White House and Congress to raise
the U.S.
borrowing limit. “But there is a group within the Republican Party that
has a
very strong voice now that wanted different changes. So that deal fell
through
at the very end.”
Biden
told the audience that despite
the current economic problems and turmoil in the financial markets, the
United
States remains “the single-best bet in the world in terms of where to
invest.”& amp; amp; amp; lt; /p>
Asked
by a student about the safety of
China’s $1.17 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities, Biden replied,
“You’re
safe.
“Please
understand that no one cares
more about this than we do, since Americans own 87 percent of all our
financial
assets and 69 percent of all our Treasury bonds, while China owns 1
percent of
our financial assets and 8 percent of our Treasury bills,
respectively,“ Biden
said.
“So
our interest is not just to
protect Chinese investment,” he said. “We have an overarching interest
in
protecting the investment, while the United States has never defaulted
and
never will default.”
Biden’s
mission here was originally
for U.S. officials to get to know China’s incoming top leader, Vice
President
Xi Jinping. But the trip became overshadowed by the economic problems
in the
United States.
At
each step of the tour, Biden
offered assurances that the U.S. economy remains strong. And his
message was
echoed by Beijing’s leaders, who have been facing criticism over
whether China
has amassed too much American debt.
Biden
travels to Mongolia next, then
Japan.
Read
it at the Washington Post
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