China currency debate

Two voices on China's currency issue appeared in Wednesday's US republican presidential debate.

Jon Huntsman - "I don't subscribe to the Donald Trump school or the Mitt Romney school of international trade. I don't want to find ourselves in a trade war. With respect to China, if you start slapping penalties on them, based on countervailing duties, you are going to get the same thing in return because they are going to say 'because of Quantitative Easing part I and part II, you are doing a similar thing to your currency'. And you are going to find yourselves in a trade war very very quickly."

Mitt Romney - "I am afraid that people who've looked at this [China's currency issue] in the past have been played like a fiddle by the Chinese. And the Chinese are smiling all the way to the bank, taking our currency and taking our jobs and taking a lot of our future...You people say, well, we might have a trade war with China, and think about that, we buy this much stuff from China, they buy that much stuff from us. You think they want to have a trade war?...I mean, this is a time when we are being hollowed out by China, that is artificially holding down their prices, and that's having a MASSIVE impact on jobs here."

Romney's view is clearly not shared by Economists Nouriel Roubini and Richard McGregor.