‘Responsible stakeholder’ vs. ‘responsible stock issuer’?

The New York Times is right, surely; gone forever are the days in which China would be a “responsible,” i.e. quiescent “stakeholder” in the U.S. economy. Now, the shoe is on the other foot:

The demands that the Chinese let their currency appreciate, clean up their banks or get rid of the subsidies for state-owned enterprises have been toned down.

You do not talk to your biggest creditor that way — especially when you have a record-sized loan application pending.

The rest of the story makes me wonder how much of TARP, etc., is even for domestic consumption. Did Henry Paulson and Tim Geithner bail out their old employer, Goldman Sachs, not so much for Wall Street as for Beijing?