China passes the USA as the world's largest consumer market

I am a confirmed and fierce Microsoft-hater, but I have to admit Bill Gates is one smart cookie, and Warren Buffet is no slouch either. I recently posted that people should short the dollar (and buy something like the Yuan, which will inevitably rise if allowed to float) and make some money as it keeps going down, mainly because Bush the noodlehead keeps focusing on the wrong things.

Now, Bill Gates notes that he is betting on America's decline and putting his money on the rise of China. Read about it here, and about how China has just passed the USA as the largest consumer market in the world.

Bill Gates is betting on America's decline and putting his money on China's rise. Or so the Microsoft founder seemed to say last month at the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland. "I'm short the dollar," he said. "The ol' dollar is going down." At the same meeting, Gates linked his pessimism about the United States to optimism about China. He commended China as the great "change agent" in the world over the next 20 years and praised its "brand-new form of capitalism." Gates isn't the only titan talking down the dollar and linking it to America's decline. Warren Buffett, Gates' friend and the world's second-richest man, has been bad-mouthing America's financial house and currency for two years. A panic in the greenback could conceivably net both men more than the cumulative lifetime earnings of thousands of their U.S. workers.

Meanwhile, China just passed the USA as the largest consumer market in the world.

WASHINGTON - China has surpassed the United States to lead the world in the consumption of basic food and industrial goods, a study says. The booming Asian country now uses more meat, grain, steel and coal, according to an environmental think-tank's report released Wednesday. The only basic commodity still consumed in greater quantities by Americans is oil, says the report from the Washington-based Earth Policy Institute. The Chinese have even eclipsed Americans in consumer goods, buying more refrigerators, more televisions and cell phones. "China is no longer just a developing country. It is an emerging economic superpower, one that is writing economic history," writes the institute's president, Lester Brown. "If the last century was the American century, this one looks to be the Chinese century."