I've never really understood the United State's economic policy towards China.  For years, China was given "Most Favored Nation" status for years in the hopes that a more open and capitalistic economy would lead their populace to demand democratic government.   Recent reports that I've heard from friends that have recently spent time in China are that China is much more capitalistic and entrepreneurial than the US is at present, but democratic government doesn't really seem to be much of an issue these days.

For years, the Chinese currency peg against the dollar seems to be an open secret, but neither Democratic or Republican administrations have seemed particularly eager to push China hard regarding currency issues in the past.  So, Geithner's recent rhetoric towards Chinese currency policy really hit me by surprise.  I'm really interested in watching to see what happens in this story, and a morbid part of me is secretly fascinated with what a currency war with China might look like.  Let's hope we never find out.

If you're interested in following this story, I'd suggest these topic channels on Newsley:  Renminbi, Chinese Currency and World Trade Organization.  

Finally, for the visually inclined.  This is what currency manipulation looks like.

We've been having a blast since we soft launched the site this past fall, and we've learned a ton. 

One of the things that we've learned is that while social news sites work for geeks, who are very interested in talking about the latest changes in technology and current events, the market for a social news site geared towards financial and economic news is limited.  Our users enjoy the news that appears on Newsley, but commenting and discussing them isn't a terribly large priority for them.  

The second thing that we've learned is that there aren't that many great content filters for economic and financial news.  There are tons of sites like Bloomberg.com, the Economist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Washington Post, etc.. that are doing a phenomenal job of writing and creating great journalism.  But these sites aren't doing a great job of filtering their articles, or providing an easy way to discover great articles on other sites.  

The final thing that we've learned from our users, is that people interested in investing, finance and economics need much better tools to sift through the firehose of financial news that is created each day.  

That's where our changes are starting.  Newsley is leaving social news behind, and we're focusing on building a real time search and recommendation engine for economic and financial news.   We're using cutting edge technologies to automatically categorize and filter news articles, and we thing you're going to find it amazingly useful.

So, we're removing a lot of things from the site, and we're completely rebuilding our back end.  There's going to be a lot more changes coming, so we'd appreciate your patience in the meantime.  A few of the more visible changes:

Thanks for using our site, and we hope you'll stop back from time to time to see what progress we're making.

Cheers,