Last week the Chinese – along with our friends the Japanese – are said to have insisted that Washington take action to protect their investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which is exactly what happened. A lot of stuff has happened in the past week – AIG’s bailout by the government, Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch’s shotgun marriage to Bank of America, to name a few. But the fact that the Chinese, or anyone for that matter, had any influence as to how our country conducts its financial affairs is by far the most important and long-ranging event. This is what it feels like to be poor. This is what it feels like to have people – or in this case a country that doesn’t particularly like us – pushing us around.

And making our creditors happy is what the game is all about. So, you and I are now the proud parents of Fannie and Freddie, which were once only government-sponsored enterprises but are now full-fledged dependents. And no sooner were they brought into the family than we adopted AIG. It’s not that I think we should have allowed Fannie and Freddie to become orphans and leave their trillions of dollars in mortgage holdings in the evil hands of the financial markets. It is just that the situation should have never gotten this bad. We should not have relied so heavily on foreign governments buying our bonds and funding our deficits. We shouldn’t have spent so much more than we had, allowing our federal deficits to soar. And if our president wants to criticize OPEC, or the Chinese, or the Japanese – for anything up to and including their cuisine – he shouldn’t have to worry about financial reprisals.

What we have right now is a delicate truce. An arrangement. Foreigners will hold their noses and keep plowing their billions into the US economy as long as Washington snaps to it whenever they have a gripe. It’s like a landlord/tenant relationship. Despite the fact that we might own the building, we as the landlord will have to jump whenever there is a leaky pipe. And right now pipes are leaking all over the place.