China is being criticized pretty extensively of late for exporting all manner of products that don’t match consumer safety standards in their target markets. A stunning example of this is a bracelet sold at Hamleys (the UK equivalent of FAO Schwarz), which contained 93% lead. Did I say contained? Basically it was lead, with a bit of paint. You don’t need to know that the legal limit is 0.1% in the UK to realize that this might be a bad thing.

In that context, enjoy this quote from CNBC anchor Erin Burnett. I understand what she was trying to say, but boy did she mess it up. At least I hope it was a mistake.

“A lot of people like to say, scaremonger about China, right? A lot of politicians and I know you talk about that issue all the time. I think people should be careful what they wish for on China — you know, if China were to revalue its currency, or China is to start making, say, toys that don’t have lead in them, or food that isn’t poisonous, their costs of production are going to go up. And that means prices at Walmart, here in the United States, are going to go up too. So, I would say China is our greatest friend right now.They’re keeping prices low, and they’re keeping prices for mortgages low too.”

Eat lead, sucker.

Kongō Gumi, a temple builder in Japan, has gone out of business. Not a huge deal, except that it started trading in 578AD, making it the world’s oldest continuously trading company.

Worldmapper.org is currently doing the rounds of blogs and emails, because it’s a very cool (though hardly original) idea. It distorts the relative sizes of countries based on a range of statistics. For example, the number of war deaths per head of population would result in Australia being practically invisible, while a mapping of the number of koalas per head of population would feature Australia quite prominently. If that doesn’t make sense, just look at the site, it’s pretty obvious.

Anyway, among all the ‘social commentary’ stats about births, poverty etc. there’s this map of toy exports. Parts of Europe are bigger than I would have expected (esp. Italy), but the big feature (literally) is China – it’s significant in several of the manufacturing categories, but not to this extent. In fact it’s even more distorted than this map of toy imports.