This is just silly. You have a big pattern of blaming the American consumer, even though these games of money supply, fiat currency & inflation are centuries old while Consumerism is not even one century old. I'm not trying to make anyone out to be angels here or start another argument as to whose fault it is that the average person opts to buy the cheaper foreign good rather than the domestic (even though the foreign is often better than domestic thanks to corporate greed) but come on, the consumer has very little to do with the Dollar decline. It's just basic math at the end of the day and like you said, it's happening all over the world irrespective of Consumerism. Consumerism is the symptom, not the cause.
100% agree. consumerism and fiat money are just two sides of the same coin. for those remembering the history gold standard was abolished mainly because it did not support growth, it was out of date, or in another words, it was not supporting consumerism. after all, even fed agrees that by printing more money they will save consumer. they just postpone the day of reckoning for later.
It's all about consumption. Consumption of foreign goods, consumption of resources, consumption of government. It's a nation where a bartender believes a night of tips should be the equivalent trade of 10 Chinese building him a Plasma. The market though say's no mas. Nothing fairer. Without a severe trade imbalance? The dollar would be 30% stronger. Anyone blaming the dollar decline on Bernanke or Bush or "They" had better look in the mirror themselves. Does posting on ET count as a unit of productivity??????
Actually, the gold standard was abolished because it hindered the INFLATION coveted so much by the Powers.
yup, there are a whole bunch of people that have daisy-chained in 1031-tax-deferred exchanges. when you take out the state & Fed taves, consider the high transaction costs AND adjust for inflation, then you can figure your yield. if these guys lose properties now, they will get a miaasive tax bill (including any "short-sale" impact). the govt gets a huge cut via taxes on inflated $$$$/price. they do better then you do on investments and im guessing cap gains taxes will rise.
I don't know why you're being so dense for someone quite intelligent but then intelligence and closemindness often go hand in hand. Like I said, Consumerism is not even 100 years old while the phenomenon we observe with the dollar is something that has happened through history many times over hundreds of years. Basic math may be a bit confusing but basic logic should appeal here. Some of the stuff you say is just so ridiculous. No, let's all uphold the dollar by volunteering even lower wages and making an agreement to hold hands and push down prices. Why don't you go first, go appeal to my landlord and the food store owners. And then let's send some money to the Chinese laborers to push their wages up.
What triggered the rate cuts in the first place? Deja Vu? This is the same fiasco that unwound with the thai baht currency derivatives debacle. Same players, different derivative instruments -- GS works with Moody's/S&P to repackage and slap high ratings on junk, whereby the risk gets passed off to pension funds, etc... At the end of the day, hopefully they'll take some responsibility for creating much of this mess (although so far, the only repercussions have been a huge gain on shorting the mortgage industry, adding to it's swift plunge). ----------------------------------------------- From: http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/SuperModels/AreWeHeadedForAnEpicBearMarket.aspx "Rather than joining the crowd that blames the mess on American slobs who took on more mortgage debt than they could afford and have endangered the world by stiffing lenders, he points a finger at three parties: regulators who stood by as U.S. banks developed ingenious but dangerous ways of shifting trillions of dollars of credit risk off their balance sheets and into the hands of unsophisticated foreign investors; hedge and pension fund managers who gorged on high-yield debt instruments they didn't understand; and financial engineers who built towers of "securitized" debt with math models that were fundamentally flawed. "Defaulting middle-class U.S. homeowners are blamed, but they are merely a pawn in the game," he says. "Those loans were invented so that hedge funds would have high-yield debt to buy."