Robert Samuelson wrote a fantastic column in today’s Washington Post about China trade that hits on everything from currency to trade deficits, to the difficult to explain current account balances.

 Everyone complains about America’s trade deficits, but they actually symbolize global leadership. Access to the U.S. market has promoted trade by enabling other countries to export. But the deficits cannot grow indefinitely. Imagine now a trading system whose largest member seems intent on accumulating permanently large surpluses. Nor, it might be added, are surpluses ultimately in China’s interests. They drain too much of its production from its citizens and contribute to growing domestic economic inequality. What everyone needs is more balanced Chinese economic growth, less dependent on exports.

Samuelson is a great guy to sit and chat about this stuff with. I remember early on, as a teenager,  when I would try to read his columns and they intimidated me. Meeting him at a talk on China currency in Washington many years later - when Morris Goldstein and AL Keidel were debating the finer points of currency manipulation - I found he was an incredibly comfortable person to sit and have a conversation about the most minute details of economy.

He knows his stuff, there is no doubt, but he is what epitomizes a good columnist - an interest in finding out more and more about a subject. We picked each other’s brains over questionable coffee, and free sandwiches, and both left all the wiser. At the time, I was more up to speed on China currency legislation, and he asked me question after question, even professing that he had read my recent articles and was now trying to catch up with the movement on Capitol Hill. It goes to show that no matter how preeminent someone is, or how nameless someone else is (me), there are always people you can learn from … and be intimidated by.