The Canadian economy has overall been very strong. While Canada’s economy grew at a hefty rate, in comparison to the American rate. In the United States growth has been slowing as business continues to be rather cautious. Both consumer and business confidence in Canada are higher than in the US ,
Auto sales have been running at record paces , even as they weaken in the us. Clearly the dramatic declines in housing activity and house prices along with the surge in gasoline prices have precipitated belt tightening among North American consumers. As well , U.S. business spending on capital growth has been running at a very modest pace and banks continue to tighten credit standards as subrprime mortgages made to less than creditworthy households during the housing boom continue to sour.
Neverthless this can not go on forever . Foreign portfolio diversification is prudent.
Forex Beginner Resource Center
for some odd reason , left wing socialist types have an anger envy type of mentality towards “speculators”. One known prototypical example - F. Russel , a very good example of the socialist dogma in action. Breaking of any of this socialististic dogma is among the greatest sins in life. “cue jumping” example in socialized medicine , example, example , example. The basic falacy in this logic is the “Pie Theory”. The “pie” remains the same . It never occurs to this crowd that increased efficiency , as rewarded by the marketplace, increases the size of the pie. More for all. Under socialism the pie remains the same in size , or even shrinks. In Communistic Russia everyone had a job , but no one could eat. Even if the foodstuffs or goods were available , they were of very poor quality. On top of that much time was spent , or better described wasted, waiting in line for scarce goods. A lot of effort was spent in how to to get around , or beat the system, in order to provide for basic human needs. It was not a case of ripping off the system for fun, it was the only way to survive the only game in town.
Under the limited Socialistic left wing mindset - if a “wealthy stockbroker” / currency trader / speculator privatized or industry by selling it from the public purse - “they sold Our phone company” “those rich stock traders” . If someone else ( the investor / trader / broker) ate a piece of pie - then that is one less piece of pie for me or for everyone else.
Never mind that the pie was small and rotten to the core. Now we have a factory to make 1000 high quality pies with many new workers now earning a good wage , income and the company earns foreign currency dollars, Euros and Yen exporting pies.
Sphere: Related ContentThe Bush Administration has published that Social Security is facing a 13.6 trillion dollar shortfall in the coming years. Delaying needed and necessary reforms is unfair to younger workers , in its estimation.
A special report issued by the American Treasury Department noted that some combination of benefit cuts and tax increases will need to be considered and implemented permanently to fix the funding shortfall. However white house officials have stressed that President George W. Bush remains opposed to raising taxes. Bush had hoped to make Social Security reform its top domestic priority of its second term. President Bush had put forward a Social Security reform plan in 2005 that focused on creation of private accounts for younger drivers but that proposal never came up for a vote in American Congress. with Democrats opposed and few Republicans embracing the idea. While Democrats have fought to protect current benefit levels , Republicans have been adamant that taxes should not be raised to cover the Social Security shortfall.
Sphere: Related ContentThe Fed’s current rate cut addressed the risk of recession and a meltdown in credit markets. But by lowering rates before it really wanted to , it revised fears of inflation - some observers have warned that inflation could force the central bank to raise rates at some point in the future
The central bank cut the target overnight lending rate to 3.5 percent from 4.25 percent, the Federal Open Market Committee said in a statement in Washington. Policy makers weren’t scheduled to gather until next week. It’s the biggest single reduction since the Fed began using the rate as the principal tool of monetary policy around 1990.
“Broader financial market conditions have continued to deteriorate and credit has tightened further for some businesses and households,” the Fed said in a statement in Washington. The FOMC took the action “in view of a weakening of the economic outlook and increasing downside risks to growth.”
Policy makers set aside concerns about inflation to lower borrowing costs for the fourth time since September after retail sales fell, the unemployment rate climbed and global stocks slumped. Chairman Ben S. Bernanke shifted the Fed’s stance to a more aggressive approach in remarks this month citing a need for “decisive and timely” action.
The bankruptcy of the United States government has been talked about for years by independent observers. If you’ve read the book, “Empire of Debt,” then you know where the U.S. is headed financially. But most people have no idea about the ultimate financial consequences of decades of borrowing and spending by Washington, and they remain irrationally convinced that the status quo will remain intact for eternity. No one in any position of authority, you see, has yet admitted that the U.S. government is indeed going bankrupt.Until now, that is.
In a remarkable paper posted by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, and authored by a Boston University teacher named Prof Kotlikoff, it is revealed in blunt, powerful language that the era of borrowing and spending without consequence may soon come to a close. The paper, entitled, Is the United States Bankrupt?, may not remain posted for very long once the public gets word of what it actually says.
And what, exactly, does it say? For starters, Kotlikoff explains, “Unless the United States moves quickly to fundamentally change and restrain its fiscal behavior, its bankruptcy will become a foregone conclusion.”
The country is bankrupt
He goes on to explain, “[that] the United States is going broke, [and] …that radical reform of U.S. fiscal institutions is essential to secure the nation’s economic future.” Failure to engage in these massive reforms will inevitably result in the financial demise of the United States, Kotlikoff says: “[W]e have a country at the end of its resources. It’s exhausted, stripped bear, destitute, bereft, wanting in property, and wrecked (at least in terms of its consumption and borrowing capacity) in consequence of failure to pay its creditors. In short, the country is bankrupt and is forced to reorganize its operations by paying its creditors (the oldsters) less than they were promised.”
We might possibly be saved, he explains, if the nation engages in massive, radical reform in three areas: 1) Eliminating the current income tax system and moving to a national retail sales tax of 33 percent. 2) Privatizing social security so that workers own their savings accounts and the federal government can no longer swipe funds from Social Security. 3) Launching a national health insurance program that covers everyone and relies on a system of government-issued vouchers that citizens can spend with health insurance companies.
These radical reforms are necessary because the future gap between what the government owes and what it stands to receive in revenues is already monstrously large, and it’s growing by the minute. This gap, called the Gokhale and Smetters measure, currently stands at an astonishing $65.9 trillion. (Yes, with a “T”.) As Kotlikoff explains, “This figure is more than five times U.S. GDP and almost twice the size of national wealth. One way to wrap one’s head around $65.9 trillion is to ask what fiscal adjustments are needed to eliminate this red hole. The answers are terrifying. One solution is an immediate and permanent doubling of personal and corporate income taxes. Another is an immediate and permanent two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits. A third alternative, were it feasible, would be to immediately and permanently cut all federal discretionary spending by 143 percent.”
If you read that last paragraph with any presence of mind, you now begin to understand the magnitude of the fiscal problem facing the United States. It could be solved, as explained above, by doubling all personal and corporate income taxes. But then what’s the point in working? It could also be solved by slashing promised benefits in Social Security and Medicare. But what about the inevitable street riots?
None of these solutions are likely to occur. And that leaves the Ace up the sleeve. It’s the Ace that all government eventually play on their way to bankruptcy and collapse, and it’s the Ace that the United States will ultimately be forced to play, too: hyperinflation. The U.S. will have to print more money to escape the financial consequences of its unbridled spending.
Hyperinflation is inevitable
As Kotlikoff explains: “Given the reluctance of our politicians to raise taxes, cut benefits, or even limit the growth in benefits, the most likely scenario is that the government will start printing money to pay its bills. This could arise in the context of the Federal Reserve “being forced” to buy Treasury bills and bonds to reduce interest rates. Specifically, once the financial markets begin to understand the depth and extent of the country’s financial insolvency, they will start worrying about inflation and about being paid back in watered-down dollars. This concern will lead them to start dumping their holdings of U.S. Treasuries. In so doing, they’ll drive up interest rates, which will lead the Fed to print money to buy up those bonds. The consequence will be more money creation—exactly what the bond traders will have come to fear. This could lead to spiraling expectations of higher inflation, with the process eventuating in hyperinflation.”
It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. Hyperinflation is actually the norm, not the exception, and it’s the escape route taken by virtually every country suffering under the burden of payment promises is cannot possibly keep. Whether we’re talking about Germany after World War I, or the United States over the next few years, hyperinflation is the only option remaining for politicians who refuse to practice fiscal sanity.
No politician ever got elected by promising voters their entitlements would be halted, did they? Political popularity is derived from promising voters precisely what the nation cannot afford: Endless entitlements and runaway spending without apparent consequence.
The China factor
The only thing keeping the U.S. afloat right now is the temporary willingness of Asian countries to keep buying U.S. debt, thereby pumping up the U.S. economy with dollars earned on the backs of Chinese laborers. But even the Chinese — known for their tolerance of hard times and manual labor — may eventually tire of lending money to a posh, arrogant Western nation that has all but abandoned the concept of saving money. Says Kotlikoff, “China is saving so much that it’s running a current account surplus. Not only is China supplying capital to the rest of the world, it’s increasingly doing so via direct investment. The question for the United States is whether China will tire of investing only indirectly in our country and begin to sell its dollar-denominated reserves. Doing so could have spectacularly bad implications for the value of the dollar and the level of U.S. interest rates.”
By “spectacularly bad implications,” Kotlikoff means the value of the U.S. dollar would plummet, the level of U.S. interest rates would skyrocket, and hyperinflation would be well underway. U.S. citizens would find not only their dollars to be near-worthless on the global market, but their savings to be all but wiped out as well. Sure, you’ll still have the same number of dollars in your bank account, but they won’t be worth anything.
This is what eventually happens, by the way, when a government eliminates the gold standard and separates its currency from precious metals. The U.S. dollar, a green piece of paper, technically stands for nothing other than the U.S. government’s promise to pay. But when push comes to shove, the government will have no choice but to hyperinflate its way out of financial obligations, thereby rendering all currently-held U.S. dollars to be virtually worthless. Those investors or citizens who hold savings in U.S. dollars will be wiped out by a government that will essentially steal their wealth without having to snatch a single physical dollar from their hands.
Future obligations cannot be met
And yet, despite the seriousness of the U.S. fiscal situation, Americans and their elected representative live their merry lives oblivious to financial reality. National newspaper headlines even add to the denial, running headlines that claim the nation’s economy is strong because the 2006 budget deficit will be “only” $296 billion. That this is considered a success by the Bush Administration is testament to the psychotic fiscal self-deception that now serves as the norm in the United States. It’s like a family that owes $1 million on a $200,000 home announcing “success” because it has just reduced its monthly credit card borrowing from $15,000 to $12,000. And that’s if you actually believe the numbers, because if there’s one area where Washington has proven its skill, it’s the expert deployment of smoke and mirrors on all things involving numbers.
Cutting the annual budget deficit won’t save us anyway. It only means that we’re barreling head-first into a brick wall at a slightly slower pace than before. The entitlements will still come due:
“There are 77 million baby boomers now ranging from age 41 to age 59. All are hoping to collect tens of thousands of dollars in pension and healthcare benefits from the next generation. These claimants aren’t going away. In three years, the oldest boomers will be eligible for early Social Security benefits. In six years, the boomer vanguard will start collecting Medicare. Our nation has done nothing to prepare for this onslaught of obligation. Instead, it has continued to focus on a completely meaningless fiscal metric—“the” federal deficit—censored and studiously ignored long-term fiscal analyses that are scientifically coherent, and dramatically expanded the benefit levels being explicitly or implicitly promised to the baby boomers.”
The result of this is not in question: The United States government is already running on fumes, and in a few more years, it will suffer financial collapse.
“Countries can and do go bankrupt,” says Kotlikoff, and the U.S. is no exception to the laws of economic reality.
Oblivious to what’s coming
The American people, as usual, remain oblivious to the financial future that awaits them. Even as the housing bubble is now beginning to burst in the nation’s most overpriced real estate markets, most people don’t have a clue what “hard times” really means. To today’s debt-ridden yuppie spenders, “hard times” means shuffling six different credit card accounts to cover the payments on an overpriced house, two new SUVs in the driveway and a vacation to Paris, none of which the yuppie couple can afford. The idea of ever having to pay back their debt and live within their means is as foreign to most Americans as it is their own government. Financial consequences have been put off so habitually, for so long, that people forget they even exist. And thus the reality awakening becomes ever more rude when it finally appears. To say that most Americans will be in a state of shock when their life savings are suddenly wiped out is an understatement: These people will have never even imagined such an event is possible, much less contemplated how it might affect them.
Rome is burning
It’s too late to save the United States from its financial meltdown, I believe. For starters, there is a complete lack of willingness to make tough financial decisions and begin paying off the national debt. Such an idea is so foreign to the U.S. that no presidential candidate in the last two decades has even seriously proposed such a plan, save perhaps Ross Perot, a man with such well-grounded ideas of cutting government spending that he was immediately branded a crackpot by the status quo. Even worse, there’s not even recognition among the masses that a financial problem exists. As long as the President continues to proclaim the economy is in good shape, and the press remains complicit with its printing of economic half-truths, few will recognize any problem at all. Besides, any such recognition of the financial problems now facing this nation requires the observers to actually be able to do basic math. Our public education system, which is now largely considered institutionalized day care for nutritionally-deficient children, has seen to it that mathematics instruction never gets in the way of diagnosing children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and drugging them up on amphetamines so powerful that they actually have a street value as recreational drugs.
Thus, few young Americans can even do math. And none of them lived through the Great Depression, nor did they understand the study of it in school, meaning they are precisely the kind of naive, overconfident yuppie spenders who are ripe for being financially obliterated by an economic meltdown. When their ignorance turns to fear, the ever-widening spiral of financial panic becomes unstoppable until the whole system hits rock bottom. And “rock bottom” is far, far below the relatively luxurious lifestyle to which American consumers have become so smugly accustomed.
Protecting yourself from the inevitable
The timetable for this economic collapse is unknown, but it’s very unlikely to happen in the next year or two. A collapse by 2012 is certainly possible, and seeing it by 2020 is almost certain. That leaves the more intelligent among us plenty of time to prepare. But the usual preparatory actions by Americans won’t suffice in such a large-scale collapse. FDIC-insured banks, for example, will almost certainly collapse and take the DFIC down with them. Even if you are repaid by the FDIC, you’ll only be paid in worthless U.S. dollars anyway.
Beating the odds on this financial hurricane requires exceptional planning and preparedness. I’ll publish practical solutions and strategies on this website in the months and years ahead. If you’d like to stay informed, subscribe to the free NewsTarget email newsletter (see below) and make sure you select either “All topics” or the “CounterThink” topic.
As a subscriber, you’ll receive an email alert when I publish new solutions to the coming financial crisis that, according to many observers, now seems a foregone conclusion. Americans, it seems, are in for a rude awakening in the near future.
http://www.newstarget.com/z019659.html
As global investors dump stocks in a flight to safety that has whipped gold prices to a series of record highs, Indians are doing just the opposite. In a nation that buys a third of the world’s gold output, even bullion dealers are selling the stuff in hopes of a seventh year of stock market gains, a trend that could cause gold’s record run to above $900 an ounce this year to stumble.
Far removed from gloomy global peers who are bracing for a US recession, Indians increasingly see limited upside for gold after last year’s rise of more than 30 percent, and are ready to shift more of their savings from jewellery toward a stock market that notched up over 40 percent gains for three years running.
“I myself, have sold gold and invested in the equity market,” Pawan Choksi, a bullion dealer based in Ahmedabad told reporters. “I am restructuring my portfolio.” “Who will take a chance with gold at these levels?” he said. “Maybe there will be a correction.”
Earlier this decade, most Indians preferred gold to a share market that they viewed as dominated by speculators and saddled with companies that had dubious earnings potential. The shift, though slow, is already taking its toll on gold. Imports by India fell as much as a fifth last year and are likely to tumble again this year if prices stay high, says Suresh Hundia, president of the Bombay Bullion Association.
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“Imports have virtually come to a standstill in the last 20 days because of the high prices,” he told reporters on Tuesday. Bullion anaylsts are, for the moment, maintaining a bullish stance, with many expecting the spot price to test the $1,000 an ounce watershed before year’s end as the falling dollar and US economic doom and gloom add to gold’s allure.
But the prospect of another 10 per cent gain is not luring many buyers into the jewellery shops in New Delhi’s famous Karol Bagh, where some banners scream “SALE” at a time when demand usually is high because of marriages in January and February. “Demand! Where is the demand?” says Ravi Sood, partner of Kidarsons Jewellers, his eyes sweeping over a near-empty shop as a lone customer huddled in a corner took apart some old jewellery to assess its value. “Only those who are in desperate need because of a marriage in the family are buying,” he said. “Even then they bring a bagful of old gold to exchange so that their budget does not go haywire.”
STOCK MARKET APPEAL
Gold jewellery has a long tradition in India as an auspicious gift for marriages, and a lifetime saving for brides, while the share market was regarded with some trepidation. But a record-breaking run by India’s stock market has elevated its profile in society, with new blue chips, huge share offerings and the rapid growth of mutual funds elevating investor confidence along the way.
Analysts say gains may be checked this year by the risk of a US recession and a slowdown in the influx of foreign funds, although most still see another positive year — and there appears to be little waning in retail appetite. On Tuesday, the initial public offering of billionaire Anil Ambani’s Reliance Power raised $3 billion — the most ever for an Indian IPO — in under 60 seconds.
Mutual fund holdings, seen as a good barometer of retail investment, are estimated to have accounted for 4.8 percent of household financial savings in the fiscal year that ended last March, up from only 0.4 percent two years earlier. “Gone are the days when fly-by-night companies could float an initial public offering,” said Prithvi Haldea, managing director of Prime Database, an expert on India’s primary share market. “Almost every IPO in 2007 got listed at a premium.”
Indian IPOs raised a record $8.3 billion last year and are expected to nearly double that this year, according to Thomson Financial data. Gold, in comparison, looks a little less lustrous. “Everybody and anybody is entering equities as penny stocks worth five to ten rupees are also rallying and going up to 20 to 40 rupees,” said Krishna Kumar Nathani, managing director of Indiabullion.com, a local consultancy. “You are getting 100 to 200 percent in a month’s time on shares,” he said. “I have never made 100 percent in gold in such a short time.”
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-2703819,prtpage-1.cms
Sphere: Related Contentephen Schwarzman may think he has image problems in America. He is the co-founder and CEO of the Blackstone Group, and he threw himself a $3 million party for his 60th birthday last spring, shortly before making many hundreds of millions of dollars in his company’s IPO and finding clever ways to avoid paying taxes. That’s nothing compared with the way he looks in China. Here, he and his company are surprisingly well known, thanks to blogs, newspapers, and talk-show references. In America, Schwarzman’s perceived offense is greed—a sin we readily forgive and forget. In China, the suspicion is that he has somehow hoodwinked ordinary Chinese people out of their hard-earned cash.
From the archives:
“Cashing Out”
(September 2007)
Is private equity just another bubble, or a sign of sickness in America’s public stock markets? By Clive Crook
Interviews: “Private Equity Deconstructed”
(August 14, 2007)
Atlantic senior editor Clive Crook weighs in on the private-equity business—why it’s booming, where it’s headed, and what it means for American capitalism.
Last June, China’s Blackstone investment was hailed in the American press as a sign of canny sophistication. It seemed just the kind of thing the U.S. government had in mind when it hammered China to use its new wealth as a “responsible stakeholder” among nations. By putting $3 billion of China’s national savings into the initial public offering of America’s best-known private-equity firm, the Chinese government allied itself with a big-time Western firm without raising political fears by trying to buy operating control (it bought only 8 percent of Blackstone’s shares, and nonvoting shares at that). The contrast with the Japanese and Saudis, who in their nouveau-riche phase roused irritation and envy with their showy purchases of Western brand names and landmark properties, was plain.
Six months later, it didn’t look so canny, at least not financially. China’s Blackstone holdings lost, on paper, about $1 billion, during a time when the composite index of the Shanghai Stock Exchange was soaring. At two different universities where I’ve spoken recently, students have pointed out that Schwarzman was a major Republican donor. A student at Fudan University knew a detail I didn’t: that in 2007 President Bush attended a Republican National Committee fund-raiser at Schwarzman’s apartment in Manhattan (think what he would have made of the fact that Schwarzman, who was one year behind Bush at Yale, had been a fellow member of Skull and Bones). Wasn’t the whole scheme a way to take money from the Chinese people and give it to the president’s crony?
The Blackstone case is titillating in its personal detail, but it is also an unusually clear and personalized symptom of a deeper, less publicized, and potentially much more destructive tension in U.S.–China relations. It’s not just Stephen Schwarzman’s company that the laobaixing, the ordinary Chinese masses, have been subsidizing. It’s everyone in the United States.
Through the quarter-century in which China has been opening to world trade, Chinese leaders have deliberately held down living standards for their own people and propped them up in the United States. This is the real meaning of the vast trade surplus—$1.4 trillion and counting, going up by about $1 billion per day—that the Chinese government has mostly parked in U.S. Treasury notes. In effect, every person in the (rich) United States has over the past 10 years or so borrowed about $4,000 from someone in the (poor) People’s Republic of China. Like so many imbalances in economics, this one can’t go on indefinitely, and therefore won’t. But the way it ends—suddenly versus gradually, for predictable reasons versus during a panic—will make an enormous difference to the U.S. and Chinese economies over the next few years, to say nothing of bystanders in Europe and elsewhere.
Any economist will say that Americans have been living better than they should—which is by definition the case when a nation’s total consumption is greater than its total production, as America’s now is. Economists will also point out that, despite the glitter of China’s big cities and the rise of its billionaire class, China’s people have been living far worse than they could. That’s what it means when a nation consumes only half of what it produces, as China does.
Neither government likes to draw attention to this arrangement, because it has been so convenient on both sides. For China, it has helped the regime guide development in the way it would like—and keep the domestic economy’s growth rate from crossing the thin line that separates “unbelievably fast” from “uncontrollably inflationary.” For America, it has meant cheaper iPods, lower interest rates, reduced mortgage payments, a lighter tax burden. But because of political tensions in both countries, and because of the huge and growing size of the imbalance, the arrangement now shows signs of cracking apart.
In an article two and a half years ago (“Countdown to a Meltdown,” July/August 2005), I described an imagined future in which a real-estate crash and shakiness in the U.S. credit markets led to panic by Chinese and other foreign investors, with unpleasant effects for years to come. The real world has recently had inklings of similar concerns. In the past six months, relative nobodies in China’s establishment were able to cause brief panics in the foreign-exchange markets merely by hinting that China might stop supplying so much money to the United States. In August, an economic researcher named He Fan, who works at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and did part of his doctoral research at Harvard, suggested in an op-ed piece in China Daily that if the U.S. dollar kept collapsing in value, China might move some of its holdings into stronger currencies. This was presented not as a threat but as a statement of the obvious, like saying that during a market panic, lots of people sell. The column quickly provoked alarmist stories in Europe and America suggesting that China was considering the “nuclear option”—unloading its dollars.
A few months later, a veteran Communist Party politician named Cheng Siwei suggested essentially the same thing He Fan had. Cheng, in his mid-70s, was trained as a chemical engineer and has no official role in setting Chinese economic policy. But within hours of his speech, a flurry of trading forced the dollar to what was then its lowest level against the euro and other currencies. The headline in the South China Morning Post the next day was: “Officials’ Words Shrivel U.S. Dollar.” Expressing amazement at the markets’ response, Carl Weinberg, chief economist at the High Frequency Economics advisory group, said, “This would be kind of like Congressman Charlie Rangel giving a speech telling the Fed to hike or cut interest rates.” (Cheng, like Rangel, is known for colorful comments—but he is less powerful, since Rangel after all chairs the House Ways and Means Committee.) In the following weeks, phrases like “run on the dollar” and “collapse of confidence” showed up more and more frequently in financial newsletters. The nervousness only increased when someone who does have influence, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, said last November, “We are worried about how to preserve the value” of China’s dollar holdings.
When the dollar is strong, the following (good) things happen: the price of food, fuel, imports, manufactured goods, and just about everything else (vacations in Europe!) goes down. The value of the stock market, real estate, and just about all other American assets goes up. Interest rates go down—for mortgage loans, credit-card debt, and commercial borrowing. Tax rates can be lower, since foreign lenders hold down the cost of financing the national debt. The only problem is that American-made goods become more expensive for foreigners, so the country’s exports are hurt.
When the dollar is weak, the following (bad) things happen: the price of food, fuel, imports, and so on (no more vacations in Europe) goes up. The value of the stock market, real estate, and just about all other American assets goes down. Interest rates are higher. Tax rates can be higher, to cover the increased cost of financing the national debt. The only benefit is that American-made goods become cheaper for foreigners, which helps create new jobs and can raise the value of export-oriented American firms (winemakers in California, producers of medical devices in New England).
The dollar’s value has been high for many years—unnaturally high, in large part because of the implicit bargain with the Chinese. Living standards in China, while rising rapidly, have by the same logic been unnaturally low. To understand why this situation probably can’t go on, and what might replace it—via a dollar crash or some other event—let’s consider how this curious balance of power arose and how it works.
Why a poor country has so much money
By 1996, China amassed its first $100 billion in foreign assets, mainly held in U.S. dollars. (China considers these holdings a state secret, so all numbers come from analyses by outside experts.) By 2001, that sum doubled to about $200 billion, according to Edwin Truman of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. Since then, it has increased more than sixfold, by well over a trillion dollars, and China’s foreign reserves are now the largest in the world. (In second place is Japan, whose economy is, at official exchange rates, nearly twice as large as China’s but which has only two-thirds the foreign assets; the next-largest after that are the United Arab Emirates and Russia.) China’s U.S. dollar assets probably account for about 70 percent of its foreign holdings, according to the latest analyses by Brad Setser, a former Treasury Department economist now with the Council on Foreign Relations; the rest are mainly in euros, plus some yen. Most of China’s U.S. investments are in conservative, low-yield instruments like Treasury notes and federal-agency bonds, rather than showier Blackstone-style bets. Because notes and bonds backed by the U.S. government are considered the safest investments in the world, they pay lower interest than corporate bonds, and for the past two years their annual interest payments of 4 to 5 percent have barely matched the 5-to-6-percent decline in the U.S. dollar’s value versus the RMB.
Americans sometimes debate (though not often) whether in principle it is good to rely so heavily on money controlled by a foreign government. The debate has never been more relevant, because America has never before been so deeply in debt to one country. Meanwhile, the Chinese are having a debate of their own—about whether the deal makes sense for them. Certainly China’s officials are aware that their stock purchases prop up 401(k) values, their money-market holdings keep down American interest rates, and their bond purchases do the same thing—plus allow our government to spend money without raising taxes.
“From a distance, this, to say the least, is strange,” Lawrence Summers, the former treasury secretary and president of Harvard, told me last year in Shanghai. He was referring to the oddity that a country with so many of its own needs still unmet would let “this $1 trillion go to a mature, old, rich place from a young, dynamic place.”
It’s more than strange. Some Chinese people are rich, but China as a whole is unbelievably short on many of the things that qualify countries as fully developed. Shanghai has about the same climate as Washington, D.C.—and its public schools have no heating. (Go to a classroom when it’s cold, and you’ll see 40 children, all in their winter jackets, their breath forming clouds in the air.) Beijing is more like Boston. On winter nights, thousands of people mass along the curbsides of major thoroughfares, enduring long waits and fighting their way onto hopelessly overcrowded public buses that then spend hours stuck on jammed roads. And these are the showcase cities! In rural Gansu province, I have seen schools where 18 junior-high-school girls share a single dormitory room, sleeping shoulder to shoulder, sardine-style.
Better schools, more-abundant parks, better health care, cleaner air and water, better sewers in the cities—you name it, and if it isn’t in some way connected to the factory-export economy, China hasn’t got it, or not enough. This is true at the personal level, too. The average cash income for workers in a big factory is about $160 per month. On the farm, it’s a small fraction of that. Most people in China feel they are moving up, but from a very low starting point.
So why is China shipping its money to America? An economist would describe the oddity by saying that China has by far the highest national savings in the world. This sounds admirable, but when taken to an extreme—as in China—it indicates an economy out of sync with the rest of the world, and one that is deliberately keeping its own people’s living standards lower than they could be. For comparison, India’s savings rate is about 25 percent, which in effect means that India’s people consume 75 percent of what they collectively produce. (Reminder from Ec 101: The savings rate is the net share of national output either exported or saved and invested for consumption in the future. Effectively, it’s what your own people produce but don’t use.) For Korea and Japan, the savings rate is typically from the high 20s to the mid-30s. Recently, America’s has at times been below zero, which means that it consumes, via imports, more than it makes.
China’s savings rate is a staggering 50 percent, which is probably unprecedented in any country in peacetime. This doesn’t mean that the average family is saving half of its earnings—though the personal savings rate in China is also very high. Much of China’s national income is “saved” almost invisibly and kept in the form of foreign assets. Until now, most Chinese have willingly put up with this, because the economy has been growing so fast that even a suppressed level of consumption makes most people richer year by year.
But saying that China has a high savings rate describes the situation without explaining it. Why should the Communist Party of China countenance a policy that takes so much wealth from the world’s poor, in their own country, and gives it to the United States? To add to the mystery, why should China be content to put so many of its holdings into dollars, knowing that the dollar is virtually guaranteed to keep losing value against the RMB? And how long can its people tolerate being denied so much of their earnings, when they and their country need so much? The Chinese government did not explicitly set out to tighten the belt on its population while offering cheap money to American homeowners. But the fact that it does results directly from explicit choices it has made—two in particular. Both arise from crucial controls the government maintains over an economy that in many other ways has become wide open. The situation may be easiest to explain by following a U.S. dollar on its journey from a customer’s hand in America to a factory in China and back again to the T-note auction in the United States.
The voyage of a dollar
Let’s say you buy an Oral-B electric toothbrush for $30 at a CVS in the United States. I choose this example because I’ve seen a factory in China that probably made the toothbrush. Most of that $30 stays in America, with CVS, the distributors, and Oral-B itself. Eventually $3 or so—an average percentage for small consumer goods—makes its way back to southern China.
When the factory originally placed its bid for Oral-B’s business, it stated the price in dollars: X million toothbrushes for Y dollars each. But the Chinese manufacturer can’t use the dollars directly. It needs RMB—to pay the workers their 1,200-RMB ($160) monthly salary, to buy supplies from other factories in China, to pay its taxes. So it takes the dollars to the local commercial bank—let’s say the Shenzhen Development Bank. After showing receipts or waybills to prove that it earned the dollars in genuine trade, not as speculative inflow, the factory trades them for RMB.
This is where the first controls kick in. In other major countries, the counterparts to the Shenzhen Development Bank can decide for themselves what to do with the dollars they take in. Trade them for euros or yen on the foreign-exchange market? Invest them directly in America? Issue dollar loans? Whatever they think will bring the highest return. But under China’s “surrender requirements,” Chinese banks can’t do those things. They must treat the dollars, in effect, as contraband, and turn most or all of them (instructions vary from time to time) over to China’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve Bank, the People’s Bank of China, for RMB at whatever is the official rate of exchange.
With thousands of transactions per day, the dollars pile up like crazy at the PBOC. More precisely, by more than a billion dollars per day. They pile up even faster than the trade surplus with America would indicate, because customers in many other countries settle their accounts in dollars, too.
The PBOC must do something with that money, and current Chinese doctrine allows it only one option: to give the dollars to another arm of the central government, the State Administration for Foreign Exchange. It is then SAFE’s job to figure out where to park the dollars for the best return: so much in U.S. stocks, so much shifted to euros, and the great majority left in the boring safety of U.S. Treasury notes.
And thus our dollar comes back home. Spent at CVS, passed to Oral-B, paid to the factory in southern China, traded for RMB at the Shenzhen bank, “surrendered” to the PBOC, passed to SAFE for investment, and then bid at auction for Treasury notes, it is ready to be reinjected into the U.S. money supply and spent again—ideally on Chinese-made goods.
At no point did an ordinary Chinese person decide to send so much money to America. In fact, at no point was most of this money at his or her disposal at all. These are in effect enforced savings, which are the result of the two huge and fundamental choices made by the central government.
One is to dictate the RMB’s value relative to other currencies, rather than allow it to be set by forces of supply and demand, as are the values of the dollar, euro, pound, etc. The obvious reason for doing this is to keep Chinese-made products cheap, so Chinese factories will stay busy. This is what Americans have in mind when they complain that the Chinese government is rigging the world currency markets. And there are numerous less obvious reasons. The very act of managing a currency’s value may be a more important distorting factor than the exact rate at which it is set. As for the rate—the subject of much U.S. lecturing—given the huge difference in living standards between China and the United States, even a big rise in the RMB’s value would leave China with a price advantage over manufacturers elsewhere. (If the RMB doubled against the dollar, a factory worker might go from earning $160 per month to $320—not enough to send many jobs back to America, though enough to hurt China’s export economy.) Once a government decides to thwart the market-driven exchange rate of its currency, it must control countless other aspects of its financial system, through instruments like surrender requirements and the equally ominous-sounding “sterilization bonds” (a way of keeping foreign-currency swaps from creating inflation, as they otherwise could).
These and similar tools are the way China’s government imposes an unbelievably high savings rate on its people. The result, while very complicated, is to keep the buying power earned through China’s exports out of the hands of Chinese consumers as a whole. Individual Chinese people have certainly gotten their hands on a lot of buying power, notably the billionaire entrepreneurs who have attracted the world’s attention (see “Mr. Zhang Builds His Dream Town,” March 2007). But when it comes to amassing international reserves, what matters is that China as a whole spends so little of what it earns, even as some Chinese people spend a lot.
The other major decision is not to use more money to address China’s needs directly—by building schools and agricultural research labs, cleaning up toxic waste, what have you. Both decisions stem from the central government’s vision of what is necessary to keep China on its unprecedented path of growth. The government doesn’t want to let the market set the value of the RMB, because it thinks that would disrupt the constant growth and the course it has carefully and expensively set for the factory-export economy. In the short run, it worries that the RMB’s value against the dollar and the euro would soar, pricing some factories in “expensive” places such as Shanghai out of business. In the long run, it views an unstable currency as a nuisance in itself, since currency fluctuation makes everything about business with the outside world more complicated. Companies have a harder time predicting overseas revenues, negotiating contracts, luring foreign investors, or predicting the costs of fuel, component parts, and other imported goods.
And the government doesn’t want to increase domestic spending dramatically, because it fears that improving average living conditions could paradoxically intensify the rich-poor tensions that are China’s major social problem. The country is already covered with bulldozers, wrecking balls, and construction cranes, all to keep the manufacturing machine steaming ahead. Trying to build anything more at the moment—sewage-treatment plants, for a start, which would mean a better life for its own people, or smokestack scrubbers and related “clean” technology, which would start to address the world pollution for which China is increasingly held responsible—would likely just drive prices up, intensifying inflation and thus reducing the already minimal purchasing power of most workers. Food prices have been rising so fast that they have led to riots. In November, a large Carrefour grocery in Chongqing offered a limited-time sale of vegetable oil, at 20 percent (11 RMB, or $1.48) off the normal price per bottle. Three people were killed and 31 injured in a stampede toward the shelves.
This is the bargain China has made—rather, the one its leaders have imposed on its people. They’ll keep creating new factory jobs, and thus reduce China’s own social tensions and create opportunities for its rural poor. The Chinese will live better year by year, though not as well as they could. And they’ll be protected from the risk of potentially catastrophic hyperinflation, which might undo what the nation’s decades of growth have built. In exchange, the government will hold much of the nation’s wealth in paper assets in the United States, thereby preventing a run on the dollar, shoring up relations between China and America, and sluicing enough cash back into Americans’ hands to let the spending go on.
What the Chinese hope will happen
The Chinese public is beginning to be aware that its government is sitting on a lot of money—money not being spent to help China directly, money not doing so well in Blackstone-style foreign investments, money invested in the ever-falling U.S. dollar. Chinese bloggers and press commentators have begun making a connection between the billions of dollars the country is sending away and the domestic needs the country has not addressed. There is more and more pressure to show that the return on foreign investments is worth China’s sacrifice—and more and more potential backlash against bets that don’t pay off. (While the Chinese government need not stand for popular election, it generally tries to reduce sources of popular discontent when it can.) The public is beginning to behave like the demanding client of an investment adviser: it wants better returns, with fewer risks.
This is the challenge facing Lou Jiwei and Gao Xiqing, who will play a larger role in the U.S. economy than Americans are accustomed to from foreigners. Lou, a longtime Communist Party official in his late 50s, is the chairman of the new China Investment Corporation, which is supposed to find creative ways to increase returns on at least $200 billion of China’s foreign assets. He is influential within the party but has little international experience. Thus the financial world’s attention has turned to Gao Xiqing, who is the CIC’s general manager.
Twenty years ago, after graduating from Duke Law School, Gao was the first Chinese citizen to pass the New York State Bar Exam. He returned to China in 1988, after several years as an associate at the New York law firm Mudge, Rose (Richard Nixon’s old firm) to teach securities law and help develop China’s newly established stock markets. By local standards, he is hip. At an economics conference in Beijing in December, other Chinese speakers wore boxy dark suits. Gao, looking fit in his mid-50s, wore a tweed jacket and black turtleneck, an Ironman-style multifunction sports watch on his wrist.
Under Lou and Gao, the CIC started with a bang with Blackstone—the wrong kind of bang. Now, many people suggest, it may be chastened enough to take a more careful approach. Indeed, that was the message it sent late last year, with news that its next round of investments would be in China’s own banks, to shore up some with credit problems. And it looks to be studying aggressive but careful ways to manage huge sums. About the time the CIC was making the Blackstone deal, its leadership and staff undertook a crash course in modern financial markets. They hired the international consulting firm McKinsey to prepare confidential reports about the way they should organize themselves and the investment principles they should apply. They hired Booz Allen Hamilton to prepare similar reports, so they could compare the two. Yet another consulting firm, Towers Perrin, provided advice, especially about staffing and pay. The CIC leaders commissioned studies of other large state-run investment funds—in Norway, Singapore, the Gulf States, Alaska—to see which approaches worked and which didn’t. They were fascinated by the way America’s richest universities managed their endowments, and ordered multiple copies of Pioneering Portfolio Management, by David Swensen, who as Yale’s chief investment officer has guided its endowment to sustained and rapid growth. Last summer, teams from the CIC made long study visits to Yale and Duke universities, among others.
Gao Xiqing and other CIC officials have avoided discussing their plans publicly. “If you tell people ahead of time what you’re going to do—well, you just can’t operate that way in a market system,” he said at his Beijing appearance. “What I can say is, we’ll play by the international rules, and we’ll be responsible investors.” Gao emphasized several times how much the CIC had to learn: “We’re the new kids on the block. Because of media attention, there is huge pressure on us—we’re already under water now.” The words “under water” were in natural-sounding English, and clearly referred to Blackstone.
Others familiar with the CIC say that its officials are coming to appreciate the unusual problems they will face. For instance: any investment group needs to be responsible to outside supervisors, and the trick for the CIC will be to make itself accountable to Communist Party leadership without becoming a mere conduit for favored investment choices by party bosses. How can it attract the best talent? Does it want to staff up quickly, to match its quickly mounting assets, by bidding for financial managers on the world market—where many of the candidates are high-priced, not fluent in Chinese, and reluctant to move to Beijing? Or can it afford to take the time to home-grow its own staff?
While the CIC is figuring out its own future, outsiders are trying to figure out the CIC—and also SAFE, which will continue handling many of China’s assets. As far as anyone can tell, the starting point for both is risk avoidance. No more Blackstones. No more CNOOC-Unocals. (In 2005, the Chinese state oil firm CNOOC attempted to buy U.S.–based Unocal. It withdrew the offer in the face of intense political opposition to the deal in America.) One person involved with the CIC said that its officials had seen recent Lou Dobbs broadcasts criticizing “Communist China” and were “shellshocked” about the political resentment their investments might encounter in the United States. For all these reasons the Chinese leadership, as another person put it, “has a strong preference to follow someone else’s lead, not in an imitative way” but as an unobtrusive minority partner wherever possible. It will follow the lead of others for now, that is, while the CIC takes its first steps as a gigantic international financial investor.
The latest analyses by Brad Setser suggest that despite all the talk about abandoning the dollar, China is still putting about as large a share of its money into dollars as ever, somewhere between 65 and 70 percent of its foreign earnings. “Politically, the last thing they want is to signal a loss of faith in the dollar,” Andy Rothman, of the financial firm CLSA, told me; that would lead to a surge in the RMB, which would hurt Chinese exporters, not to mention the damage it would cause to China’s vast existing dollar assets.
The problem is that these and other foreign observers must guess at China’s aims, rather than knowing for sure. As Rothman put it, “The opaqueness about intentions and goals is always the issue.” The mini-panics last year took hold precisely because no one could be sure that SAFE was not about to change course.
The uncertainty arises in part from the limited track record of China’s new financial leadership. As one American financier pointed out to me: “The man in charge of the whole thing”—Lou Jiwei—“has never bought a share of stock, never bought a car, never bought a house.” Another foreign financier said, after meeting some CIC staffers, “By Chinese terms, these are very sophisticated people.” But, he went on to say, in a professional sense none of them had lived through the financial crises of the last generation: the U.S. market crash of 1987, the “Asian flu” of the late 1990s, the collapse of the Internet bubble soon afterward. The Chinese economy was affected by all these upheavals, but the likes of Gao Xiqing were not fully exposed to their lessons, sheltered as they were within Chinese institutions.
Foreign observers also suggest that, even after exposure to the Lou Dobbs clips, the Chinese financial leadership may not yet fully grasp how suspicious other countries are likely to be of China’s financial intentions, for reasons both fair and unfair. The unfair reason is all-purpose nervousness about any new rising power. “They need to understand, and they don’t, that everything they do will be seen as political,” a financier with extensive experience in both China and America told me. “Whatever they buy, whatever they say, whatever they do will be seen as China Inc.”
The fair reason for concern is, again, the transparency problem. Twice in the past year, China has in nonfinancial ways demonstrated the ripples that a nontransparent policy creates. Last January, its military intentionally shot down one of its own satellites, filling orbital paths with debris. The exercise greatly alarmed the U.S. military, because of what seemed to be an implied threat to America’s crucial space sensors. For several days, the Chinese government said nothing at all about the test, and nearly a year later, foreign analysts still debate whether it was a deliberate provocation, the result of a misunderstanding, or a freelance effort by the military. In November, China denied a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the Kitty Hawk, routine permission to dock in Hong Kong for Thanksgiving, even though many Navy families had gone there for a reunion. In each case, the most ominous aspect is that outsiders could not really be sure what the Chinese leadership had in mind. Were these deliberate taunts or shows of strength? The results of factional feuding within the leadership? Simple miscalculations? In the absence of clear official explanations no one really knew, and many assumed the worst.
So it could be with finance, unless China becomes as transparent as it is rich. Chinese officials say they will move in that direction, but they’re in no hurry. Last fall, Edwin Truman prepared a good-governance scorecard for dozens of “sovereign wealth” funds—government-run investment funds like SAFE and the CIC. He compared funds from Singapore, Korea, Norway, and elsewhere, ranking them on governing structure, openness, and similar qualities. China’s funds ended up in the lower third of his list—better-run than Iran’s, Sudan’s, or Algeria’s, but worse than Mexico’s, Russia’s, or Kuwait’s. China received no points in the “governance” category and half a point out of a possible 12 for “transparency and accountability.”
Foreigners (ordinary Chinese too, for that matter) can’t be sure about the mixture of political and strictly economic motives behind future investment decisions the Chinese might make. When China’s president, Hu Jintao, visited Seattle two years ago, he announced a large purchase of Boeing aircraft. When France’s new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, visited China late last year, Hu announced an even larger purchase of Airbuses. Every Chinese order for an airplane is a political as well as commercial decision. Brad Setser says that the Chinese government probably believed that it would get “credit” for the Blackstone purchase in whatever negotiations came up next with the United States, in the same way it would get credit for choosing Boeing. This is another twist to the Kremlinology of trying to discern China’s investment strategy.
Where the money goes, other kinds of power follow. Just ask Mikhail Gorbachev, as he reflects on the role bankruptcy played in bringing down the Soviet empire. While Japan’s great wealth has not yet made it a major diplomatic actor, and China has so far shied from, rather than seized, opportunities to influence events outside its immediate realm, time and money could change that. China’s military is too weak to challenge the U.S. directly even in the Taiwan Straits, let alone anyplace else. That, too, could change.
A Balance of Terror
Let’s take these fears about a rich, strong China to their logical extreme. The U.S. and Chinese governments are always disagreeing—about trade, foreign policy, the environment. Someday the disagreement could be severe. Taiwan, Tibet, North Korea, Iran—the possibilities are many, though Taiwan always heads the list. Perhaps a crackdown within China. Perhaps another accident, like the U.S. bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade nine years ago, which everyone in China still believes was intentional and which no prudent American ever mentions here.
Whatever the provocation, China would consider its levers and weapons and find one stronger than all the rest—one no other country in the world can wield. Without China’s billion dollars a day, the United States could not keep its economy stable or spare the dollar from collapse.
Would the Chinese use that weapon? The reasonable answer is no, because they would wound themselves grievously, too. Their years of national savings are held in the same dollars that would be ruined; in a panic, they’d get only a small share out before the value fell. Besides, their factories depend on customers with dollars to spend.
But that “reassuring” answer is actually frightening. Lawrence Summers calls today’s arrangement “the balance of financial terror,” and says that it is flawed in the same way that the “mutually assured destruction” of the Cold War era was. That doctrine held that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would dare use its nuclear weapons against the other, since it would be destroyed in return. With allowances for hyperbole, something similar applies to the dollar standoff. China can’t afford to stop feeding dollars to Americans, because China’s own dollar holdings would be devastated if it did. As long as that logic holds, the system works. As soon as it doesn’t, we have a big problem.
What might poke a giant hole in that logic? Not necessarily a titanic struggle over the future of Taiwan. A simple mistake, for one thing. Another speech by Cheng Siwei—perhaps in response to a provocation by Lou Dobbs. A rumor that the oil economies are moving out of dollars for good, setting their prices in euros. Leaked suggestions that the Chinese government is hoping to buy Intel, leading to angry denunciations on the Capitol floor, leading to news that the Chinese will sit out the next Treasury auction. As many world tragedies have been caused by miscalculation as by malice.
Or pent-up political tensions, on all sides. China’s lopsided growth—ahead in exports, behind in schooling, the environment, and everything else—makes the country socially less stable as it grows richer. Meanwhile, its expansion disrupts industries and provokes tensions in the rest of the world. The billions of dollars China pumps into the United States each week strangely seem to make it harder rather than easier for Americans to face their own structural problems. One day, something snaps. Suppose the CIC makes another bad bet—not another Blackstone but another WorldCom, with billions of dollars of Chinese people’s assets irretrievably wiped out. They will need someone to blame, and Americans, for their part, are already primed to blame China back.
So, the shock comes. Does it inevitably cause a cataclysm? No one can know until it’s too late. The important question to ask about the U.S.–China relationship, the economist Eswar Prasad, of Cornell, recently wrote in a paper about financial imbalances, is whether it has “enough flexibility to withstand and recover from large shocks, either internal or external.” He suggested that the contained tensions were so great that the answer could be no.
Today’s American system values upheaval; it’s been a while since we’ve seen too much of it. But Americans who lived through the Depression knew the pain real disruption can bring. Today’s Chinese, looking back on their country’s last century, know, too. With a lack of tragic imagination, Americans have drifted into an arrangement that is comfortable while it lasts, and could last for a while more. But not much longer.
Years ago, the Chinese might have averted today’s pressures by choosing a slower and more balanced approach to growth. If they had it to do over again, I suspect they would in fact choose just the same path—they have gained so much, including the assets they can use to do what they have left undone, whenever the government chooses to spend them. The same is not true, I suspect, for the United States, which might have chosen a very different path: less reliance on China’s subsidies, more reliance on paying as we go. But it’s a little late for those thoughts now. What’s left is to prepare for what we find at the end of the path we have taken.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/fallows-chinese-dollars
Sphere: Related ContentThe real estate slump has no fix - either quick or long standing. The real estate slump could expand into more than a slow-blown recession. The housing market in major U.S. cities are in a state of a major mess. Even the real estate agents and industry are in no position to deny this situation - even though the real estate industry still says ” Its a great time to buy “, “Don’t miss out”. In Southern California real estate values are also in the tank. The gloom however is far less pervasive. In the real estate retail marketplace intertia marches and presses onwards. However the housing decline seems to be a self generating phenomenon, the product of too-high high real estate prices and too easy and even crazy , non sustainable lending practices , and very low interest rate structure and rates.
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One of the dramas gripping the U.S. economy is that of sub-prime mortgages. Act two - which is all about house and housing prices. asset-backed commercial paper and the three month Libor rate - came to a spectacular end when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by an aggressive 50 basis points. Act three will be about the dollar. If low interest rates have caused foreign investors to lose confidence in the U.S. currency then the chances of recession and recessionary pressures in the world’s largest economy will rise. Mortgages are linked to long term rates more than to base rates. It is more than the possible that the cost of new mortgages will rise and as a result of the Fed’s cut.
If foreign investors anticipate inflation and start to dump some of more than 12,000 billion in US debt , it can turn into more than a major rout. The declining dollar will repercussions around the globe. The rise in the Euro’s effective exchange rate has been almost as fast as that of the dollar’s fall.
Europe’s business and politicians - stung by low export efffectiveness - The European Central Bank will be reluctant to oblige. All those Asian countries that peg their currencies to the greenback - either explicitly or implicitly - also have a problem. China will either buy dollars even faster than present , unsustainable rate. or let the remninbi rise and take a huge loss on its existing reserves.
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Many who have long and longer term memories can still recall the Yom Kippur war of October 1973 between Israel and its Arab neighbors , the subsequent OPEC oil embargo that sent the price of oil from $ U.S. $ 3 a barrel of oil to the then staggering U.S. $ 12, and the economic turmoil that followed the series of events.
The fallout from that conflict lasted for about a decade and a half. Many will point out , with great validity and with documentatation , that the war was just a marker , indeed a marker and coincidence rather than cause and causation. The oil producers had begun to see that their product was not only in short supply and essential to the western world, and that they no longer had to kowtow to the industrialized world and the oil supply companies.
In the immediate aftermath of the oil-price sticker shock, it can not be disputed that the cost of almost everything else began to rise. Workers naturally demanded hefty pay hikes to “keep up”. Government spending spiraled out of any control.
An inflationary psychology became embedded in the economic world. It took nearly a decade of appallingly high interest rates to wrestle this devil of inflation to the ground. We have been mercifully free of such a vicious and debilitating cycle when in the late 1980/s inflation and interest rates began to recede, but there are good reasons to feel another round of rapidly rising prices. Petroleum - both crude oil , as well as oil and petroleum products - whether it be gasoline ,diesel and heating fuels as well as such basics of our economy - fertilizers and plastics.
Like it our not our economy , at present , runs on oil and the cost of this resource is now much higher than it was in the not too distant past.
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