On March 1st, during a segment on his weekly WOR radio show with John Gambling, NYC mayor, Mike Bloomberg, was waxing financial on the urgency of the federal deficit issue:

“We are spending money we don’t have. It’s not like your household. In your household [it’s] ‘Oh, you can’t spend money you don’t have.’ That is true for your household because nobody is going to lend you an infinite amount of money. When it comes to the United States federal government, people do seem willing to lend us an infinite amount of money. Our debt is so big, and so many people own it, that it’s preposterous to think that they would stop selling us more. It’s the old story: If you owe the bank $50,000, you got a problem. If you owe the bank $50 million, they got a problem. And that’s a problem for the lenders. They can’t stop lending us more money.”

A day later, delivering a speech in Tokyo meant to convince to world to comply with a G20 consensus to avert  an international crisis in the currency markets, Yi Gang, deputy governor of China’s central bank, said Beijing is “fully prepared” for a currency war.

So while families continue to enact belt-tightening measures in their humble homes, Mayor Bloomberg bets that the Chinese are too scared to blink first and demand a return on their investment.  But whose saber rattles louder?

Perhaps Hizzoner can convince the Chinese that anything greater than 20 oz. worth of ROI would make them obese and spike their cholesterol to dangerous levels…