The life of a blogger is not quite as glamorous as it may appear to a typical outsider. Sure, you get to write whatever you want, with few if any repercussions when you write something stupid. The pay isn’t so great, but on the other hand there’s no boss yelling at you to make a deadline or toe the company line.

On the other hand, you do have to wade through an avalanche of bullshit on occasion. Today certainly qualifies as one of those days as a torrent of articles and blog posts appeared concerning the US dollar and China’s purchase of dollar denominated assets.

Where to begin? Let’s start with an op-ed in the New York Times by a gentleman named Victor Zhikai Gao. Now, I’ve never heard of Gao Zhikai before, and I’m sure he’s a heck of a lot smarter than me, but his op-ed piece sure seems like a waste of space.

Here’s how Mr. Gao starts off:

In China, many people refer to the dollar as mei jin, or “American gold.” Government officials, businessmen and people on the street all use the term. So if a Chinese person tells you that he owes you 100 American gold, don’t expect a big fortune, because he’s planning to pay you $100.

How cute is that? If he knows that, he must know a lot about foreign currency and Chinese economic policy, right?

Possibly, but unfortunately we don’t learn all that much by reading this column. After that cutesy first paragraph, Gao goes on to tell us . . . well, he doesn’t really tell us anything.

As far as I can tell, the fundamental message of the op-ed is that the Chinese government used to really really like the US dollar, and now — not so much. Astounding news, that. Perhaps the New York Times desperately needed to fill some space today and were willing to run an op-ed that could have been summarized in one line. (Even then, it still beats the usual George Will column in the Post as far as “waste of space” goes.)

By the way, and I’m certainly no Chinese language expert, but the statement that everyone over here uses the term “mei jin” all the time sounds a bit strange to me. I’ve heard it before, but not very often. Standard usage calls for “mei yuan” — and unless I’ve been spending way too much time with people whose Chinese is really fucked up, I would say that Mr. Gao’s initial example, cute as it is, is a bit forced.

Next on the parade of hits is Dean Baker, economist and (if I’m not mistaken) a bit of a media whore. Baker wrote a blog post today chastising folks like Nouriel Roubini for sounding the alarm when it comes to Chinese divestment of US dollar assets. According to Baker, as a dollar devaluation would be favorable to US terms of trade, Americans should be all in favor of such divestment. Baker seems to think that the trade deficit is the number one problem facing the United States at the moment, and anything that could help that situation should be encouraged.

In addition to not being an expert on the Chinese language, I’m not an economist, and therefore normally don’t like to go up against PhD types on these issues. In this case however, I’ll make an exception.

What is the number one priority for the US economy at the present time? It certainly isn’t the trade deficit. Call me nuts, but I would say that the current mega-recession and the cataclysmic drop in demand is something we should all be a little bit more worried about.

If China dumps its dollars (something they’re not going to do), and the dollar tanks, then yes, this would be beneficial to the U.S. in terms of the bilateral trade deficit with China. Not addressed by Baker, however, are the other effects of the dollar plummeting in value. For one thing, interest rates would spike. Is that really something that we want at a time when the US government is borrowing unprecedented amounts of money? Doesn’t sound good to me, but I’m no economist.

What was Roubini saying that was so awful? Basically, his op-ed was an explanatory piece outlining not only why the US dollar is going to be under pressure at some point in the near future, but how and why China’s currency will be ascendant. Nothing shocking here, but a good piece that included some helpful historical examples.

I’m really not sure what got Baker so upset. Who can argue with the following?

Sooner than we think, the dollar may be challenged by other currencies, most likely the Chinese renminbi. This would have serious costs for America, as our ability to finance our budget and trade deficits cheaply would disappear.

Again, the issue of deficit financing during a serious recession seems to be a fairly obvious point. The fact that Baker fails to even bring this up in his column suggests to me that he has another agenda. If I was a betting man, I would put my money on protectionism as that agenda — of course, I’m not a betting man.

Between all of these ridiculous stories and the senseless actions of the US Congress with respect to punitive tariff measures, it’s been a rough couple of days, and I’m looking forward to the weekend.