On November 12, 2009, ahead of US President Barak Obama’s first trip to Asia, the People’s Bank of China announced that it would consider future discussions over de-linking the Chinese renmimbi (usually graded in 10 unit amounts, called yuan) from the US dollar. Reinforcing the overall level of concern, several days later the chairman of the Chinese Banking Regulatory Commission, Liu Mingkang, stated that a weak dollar threatened a global economic recovery, encouraging asset bubbles in emerging economies and threatening another round of speculative investment, this time more evenly placed across the globe—giving voice to long running Chinese suspicions that the weak dollar is as much the result of US policy as it is the whims of the global markets or the long-term dynamics of shifts in global production structures. Commissioner Liu is likely wrong—though not in his assessment of the impact of the weak dollar. There he is likely right on the money, so to speak. Where he is mistaken is in his assessment that the United States has a weak dollar policy. In fact, current statements on the importance of a strong dollar by US Treasury Secretary Rubin aside, there would seem to be no US policy on the dollar. This ought to frighten the Chinese and everyone else a good deal more than the weak dollar. The last time the United States had a coordinated approach to international valuations of its own currency that was tied to its domestic lending action was in 1985, when Reagan’s Treasury Secretary James Baker 3rd crafted the Plaza Accord in conjunction with economic leaders from Europe and Japan. The Accord was meant to cartelize international currency valuation through a planned series of cuts in the US Federal domestic lending rate, timed to coincide with similar monetary policies in Germany and Japan, that would result in a gradual devaluation of the dollar against world currencies (especially the German Mark and the Japanese Yen). This was presented as being necessary to expand the money supply in the United