Let's compare jibes, one from China and the other from the United States.

In a front page guest editorial in People's Daily on November 7, Professor Shi Jianxun of Tongji University in Shanghai accused the United States of – get this – currency manipulation. He charged that quantitative easing works to drive down the dollar in order to foster economic growth through greater exports. Mr. Shi wrote: “In essence this is an uncontrolled increase in money supply, equal to indirect exchange rate manipulation..."

Communist propaganda? Hardly: it's obvious truth. According to Larry Summers, the President has set set “a crucial goal of doubling exports.” A fallen dollar is the only practical tool. And easy money plainly has one tangible result: to drive down the dollar, at least for now.

The Chinese don't like it because a lower dollar means higher inflation in basic goods – wheat, corn, oil – that they import. Inflation is a very sensitive issue in China – capable of setting off mass protests, as in 1989. With the RMB tied to the lower dollar, the Chinese also get an export boost in third-country markets. That's exactly opposite to American desires, but one can't easily argue that doing nothing in the face of blatant US currency manipulation amounts to manipulation on the Chinese side.

So the Chinese have caught us in the exact policy of which we have long accused them -- on much weaker grounds. What's our drop on them?

Secretary Geithner's G-20 gambit is that all countries should adopt “indicative guidelines” to reduce their trade surpluses or their deficits – a worldwide balancing-up of accounts. Thus the Chinese should consume more and export less, while the US should import less and export more. Geithner argues that a big realignment of the dollar/RMB exchange rate would achieve this.

But it wouldn't. The price of Chinese goods in the US doesn't rise or fall stupidly with currency values: the marketers are US-based distributors and they price at what consumers will pay here. At most a big rise in the RMB might induce them to move some procurement to, say, Vietnam. American consumers would notice little or nothing, overall import volumes would not change, and no jobs would return to the United States.

The only real way to balance accounts would be for China to grow even faster, raising commodity imports and Chinese food and fuel inflation, which would be very dangerous for China. And for US consumption to grow more slowly, cutting our imports of computers and cars. A new recession would help here, but I haven't heard Mr. Geithner call for that; the growth he says he wants would increase US imports.

Balancing accounts, in short, is a policy non-starter; it barely functions as a talking point.

Back to Seoul. Which of these two positions would you rather take into debate before world leaders and the global press? The Chinese jibe, which is succinct, irrefutable, and damning? Or the American counter, which is mushy, full of contradictions and impossible to carry out in practice?

In the great world of financial cut-and-thrust, it's professionals against amateurs, just now.

Can a referee step in and stop this match?

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The Asian (and European and Latin American) complaints are valid. Not only is the Fed's strategy likely to do little good in stimulating growth, it could potentially do great harm, even in the short term, by causing further dollar depreciation, triggering trade disputes and capital controls abroad (as it already has), and making it harder to achieve concessions from other countries that would help rebalance global demand. In the longer term, the QE II policy is very risky, since it exposes the US to inflation risk, notwithstanding the overly optimistic assurances from the Fed that they will act to prevent that.