During the presidential debates and on the campaign trail, former Governor Mitt Romney has focused many of his attacks on China. Accusing them of "manipulating their currency" to gain and unfair trade advantage against the U.S., Romney has promised to isolate China on his first day in his office in part of a broader hawkish policy towards China. But not only is Romney wrong to demonize China, he completely ignores the real currency manipulators: the U.S. Federal Reserve.

In classic politician doublespeak, Romney's accusations against China are a few truths mixed in with a lot of lies, pandering and propaganda. While it is true that China has been keeping the value of its currency artificially low over the last decade, this has been largely in response to the U.S. doing essentially the exact same thing for four decades now.

Since 1971 when President Nixon infamously defaulted and cut all gold ties from the dollar, the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve have been printing trillions of dollars as part of a deliberate strategy to boost U.S. exports and harm nations exporting goods to the U.S. China holds hundreds of billions worth of U.S. government bonds of debt and has been repaying its creditors, like China, with increasingly devalued dollars.