very well. Your position sounds right to me. If there is a deep recession, the dollar will rally big time.

Many of The currencies that have rallied have been largely resource based, e.g., Australia, Canada, Brazil etc. If we have a deep recession they will fall back considerably.

The euro, from my point of view, is odd. It is not pegged to anything. The Asian currencies are largely pegged to the dollar, or they debase themselves relative to the dollar to gain our trade.

So the euro is a more honest currency and has risen more by default. Europe is no great place either. It's a place to park your short funds while the Asians and the US play their games.

All this will change if there is a recession of any size; then the dollar will go through the roof.

http://mauberly.blogspot.com/

General market sentiment seems to be that the dollar is in long term decline because the power and prestige of the US has crested and is declining, with the torch passing to Asia.

But forex isn't something that most people trade long term. Near term, there will be many bear traps along the way, and I wouldn't be surprised if one is developing right now. In addition, there are too many variables (read wild cards) not directly related to economics to be able to say very much near term. After all, the US is at war in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq, and possibly soon in Iran, and even Syria. It's not out of the question that the whole ME could catch fire.

The value of the dollar is still significantly a reflection of confidence in US power and prestige, and many still regard the US as the safest haven in uncertain or trying times, as well as the world leader, despite Bush/Cheney. This is likely to be the case for the foreseeable future -- unless, e.g., Al Qaeda is able to penetrate US defenses with WMD, heaven forbid, in which case all bets are off.

However, for those living in the US it is also necessary to look at domestic inflation in assessing the value of the dollar. The Fed has definitely abandoned inflation control in favor of bailing out the financial sector. Wars, especially wars without sacrifice are inflationary. High liquidity and accelerating debt are inflationary. Increasing scarcity of necessary resources is inflationary. So the trend is toward increasing inflation. On the other hand, strongly deflationary forces are building in home prices and wages and salaries. If a slow down turns into a recession and them some, things might go the other way. Right now, we are seeing both ways at once, and the middle class is taking it on the chin. Will they continue to put up with this? That's the question for '08. And will the incoming administration be able to fix the situation as the bills come due?

So I don't thnk much can be said generally about the dollar other than the US and the dollar are in long term decline, unless ....

But cannot quite see how that torch passes to Asia. I would need to be convinced. I have had considerable experience with China - the primary economy there now, next to Japan. That is a place that has so many negatives that I do not see how they can be overcome as a place that one would put money with confidence. That is the reason their currency needed to be pegged to ours.

The country does not have a good property rights history. You really don't own anything there, being their communist government, history, culture. They hold significant US currency reserves, but have nothing like a central bank or lending regime. How do you borrow when you can't be sure of your ownership of anything. The other big piece of the puzzle is how corrupt everyone is over there, and that is a very serious problem. Nothing is built to specs, nothing is done well, nothing is built with the materials contracted for. You turn your back and you are, well, 'Shanghaied.' The Mag Lev trains that were so highly touted, are shifting because the foundations were all done incorrectly, and the poor quality of the cement used has prevented their operation. There are now questions about the quality of work on the Three Gorges Dam - imagine a three gorges dam failure? They do not honor contracts, nothing. It is terrible. Look at the disaster with toys. I have spent as much time consulting companies trying to figure how to get out of China as how to get in these days.

On top of that, the country is a desert, it is drier than Australia. The deserts are growing. So the south side of the country is in constant flood and the north is in desert. And they have completely messed up their agricultural industry, taking some of the best farm land and water for agriculture and shifted it to industry. They are now one of the largest importers of food. Hard to be a world learder when you can't even feed yourself. They have carless Saturdays now. Which then brings up the abyssmal environmental record. One thing about communism, it is not green. Their water, air, soils, radiation any type of pollution you can name, the poor people of China have been subjected to. It is awful. Look at the pictures of the poor young people living in squalid employment camps near the factories belching every type of pollution and heavy metal you can name.

The water going into their houses is polluted. The food they eat is polluted. Think the tainted food we get from China is bad? They have no recourse. Then there are the State run businesses that bleed money and are kept off book. Sure they are making money from exports, but they proceed to lose that money in these horrid horrid state factories.

So, get me over the hump here. How does a desert country that cannot feed itself, that has utterly fouled its air, water and land, has no private property rights, no central banking system, a nation that is corrupt to its core, assume the mantle of world currency.

But cannot quite see how that torch passes to Asia.

According to prognosticators, this will become evident in about 2030 and kick in around 2050. China has a lot of catching up to do, but lots going for it when it does, including millions of overseas Chinese in just about every other economy, especially Asian. They are already globalized. Overseas Chinese tend to be fairly integrated in the places they settled, often generations ago, but remain Chinese in heart and spirit. This will be a huge advantage.

The Chinese will hang on the training wheels of the US as long as they deem necessary. But when they cut loose, it's sayonara, or however you say "goodbye" in Chinese. I don't see them unpegging from the dollar all at once. It will be series of gradual steps.

As far as their Communist past goes, this will also trun out to be an advantage. We are in the last stages of capitalism and nationalism. Wars are, after all, the conflicts of ruling elites that are generally grounded in economics reasons.

The coming global architecture may be more socialistic and international, possibly working toward an international currency down the line in order to avoid exported/imported inflation.

Now the US is living high by exporting inflation to its clients. This would ordinarily undermine a currency but the power of the US is so far capable of pulling it off. What with the Saudi refusing to go along and cut rates with the Fed as they usually do, that may be a signal that this is wearing then and possibly even coming to an end.

That's like our announced mission to Mars in 2037. Translation: Never.

A million things happen between now and then. Need more convincing. And I fail to see how the absence of private property rights is an advantage, and one must really come to grips with the food problem over there, the water problem, the pollution problem, and the corruption.

We'll see, I guess, in 43 years. Don't know if I'll make it till then.

Basically, the argument for the torch passing to Asia is that siae matters. The US is the world leader because it has the largest GNP, which funds its huge military machine that accounts for 43% of global military spending. China is expected to reach parity with the US around 2030 and be unquestionably ascendant in about 2050, with the largest economy in the world by far.

While it is true that there are many problems to overcome in China and Asia as a whole, Asians have the highest IQ of any racial group and they also have a tradition of being the hardest working, a difficult combination to match.

The US and China both have population problems. China's is too many and the US's too little. But China's advantage here is a plethora of potential domestic workers and customers. To keep up the US will have to open its borders and in doing so is going to look a lot different in the coming decades. This is being foreshadowed now by the GOP attempt to play to the white supremacist vote, but it is doomed to failure as "minorities" become the new majority.

Moreover, the US model of "rugged individualism" was suitable when the US had a frontier. The dominant conservative tendency of the US is backward looking in this regard rather than forward looking, much to the consternation of progressives. Now, the ability to organize and cooperate is much more important. China is good at that.

that comparing IQs across "racial groups" is pretty much meaningless. IQ tests between cultures/nations/etc. are not reliable, though the results of such are often touted for... less than honorable objectives (to put it very delicately). The same goes for the "Asians are hardworking," etc.--positive stereotypes are often just as harmful as negative ones.

Ran across this interesting bit on Financial Times this afternoon. China is just plain screwed. They left their cultural heritage, killed off their history, supplanted it with the disaster that is communism in the form it has taken in Russia and China.

"China’s Three Gorges dam threatens to become an environmental catastrophe if the government does not act quickly, senior Chinese officials have warned in an unusual public nod to the massive project’s ecological impact.

The comments, carried in state media on Wednesday, mark a rare Chinese admission that dire predictions of ecological destruction from international experts and domestic opponents of the world’s largest dam are coming true.

Landslides, silting, and erosion above the dam are creating environmental and safety hazards that cannot be ignored, Wang Xiaofeng, director of the State Council Three Gorges Construction Committee, was quoted as saying. “We cannot exchange environmental destruction for short-term economic gain,” he said.

After 15 years of construction the controversial project has affected a 600km stretch of the country’s largest river, with local officials complaining of increased landslides and a profusion of algal blooms along the length of the reservoir.

The flow of the Yangtze above the dam has been reduced from 2 metres per second to 0.2 m/s, causing the sediment in the river’s famously muddy water to settle on the riverbed.

Local governments are faced with huge and growing problems just to keep the dam operational and warn that increased silting could make parts of the river impassable for shipping transport, negating one of the main rationales for the dam in the first place, according to Jean-Louis Chaussade, chief executive of Suez Environment, who met with local officials in recent months.

Unfettered dumping of industrial wastewater and the submergence of numerous toxic factories when the dam was first built have added to the problems of a project that involved the forced relocation of 1.3m people."

far from changing the essential character and culture of the Chinese, the last hundred years are a pimple on a gnat's ass. The Revolution was completely ineffectual in stamping out the mercantilism so close to the Chinese heart; it finally gave up.

The Chinese practice the Water Way; they absorb and they endure. When it all calms down the same charcoal braziers come out, the same fish stalls, the same rice paddies and pig pens, the same merchants... It's been going on that way a long, long time.

But charcoal braziers, fish stalls and rice patties, pig pens, mercantilism do not a world economy make.

I did not say China would not endure, or that their culture would not reemerge. The imposition of a Western regime on this five thousand years' empire is the pimple on the gnat's ass. I believe they will shake it off and go back to an essentialy agrarian economy. But to take 10 years of 10% GDP growth and extrapolate that into the future forever and then watch it pass the US economy growing at 2% annually in 50 years is not reality, because it cannot happen given our resources, given China's resources. There is not enough water, energy, copper, coal in the world to support the premise. But China will survive and communism will not in the modern form it has harnessed itself.

going back to an Agrarian economy. As for the rest of it - a lot of those problems are no different than 19th century Europe or America. They can and will be solved. The Chinese aren't stupid, they know what's going on.

Are you saying the technology and potential pollutants in the 20th century are the same as the 19th century. We didn't have cars in the 19th century, but horses, no electricity. You think they were burning coal in the 19th century like they are in the 20th and the 21st?

The problems of America in the 19th century were agrarian, we were building an agrarian economy not an industrial one. We did not have peak oil in the 19th century, or peak copper or peak coal. We were never a country that has needed to import their basic foodstocks.

china has already begun to limit water and land uses for industrial purposes to preserve their food base, they are backing out of ethanol food to fuel schemes. They are reintroducing bicycles to areas, and mandating carless Saturdays in some cities. They are rationing gasoline and kerosene in other cities, and in still others providing electricity 10 hours per day because they do not have the capacity to generate more. Some factories are only allowed to operate at night. Half my clients associated with China are trying to figure out how to get OUT. How do you propose they will solve the problem of three gorges dam, or the fouling of the water of entire cities?

You think our banking system is shaky. You cannot imagine the losses that are papered over in China within their State businesses. They have absolutely no transparency in their financial systems. I don't even think you can call their schemes of finance banking. No legal system? The west had 100's of years of legal precedent, a base of human rights, the egalitarian ideals of the European West that goes back to Socrates. China takes their peaceful monks (a potential source of humanist philosophy for China) and shoots them in the head. They make the six year old Tibetan children shoot their parents. How exactly is this a world model for anything??

The Chinese aren't stupid but they also have no feedback loop within the communist power structures, which is why pollution tends to be worse in communist regimes. Smart is not wisdom. I would describe them as smart but cruel. The top down structure does not provide feedback in any part of the process. Three Gorges was predicted to be a disaster in exactly the fashion it has turned out to be from almost the day it was conceived. The backing up of a muddy river? What were they thinking.

So, I would say we will be able to figure out who is right within the next ten years. It is Japan aka 80's all over again. Besides which, I believe you are the one with the strong views about labor arbitrage, isn't a good thing that business here wants out of China??

chunk of my childhood in 3rd world countries. I know how bad things can be in terms of corruption, etc... Don't think you're telling me squat I'm not aware of. And yeah, the parralells are significant - China is an agrarian economy which is industrializing, they are doing so using coal, they have huge amounts of corruption, they have a banking system which is dubious, etc...

You don't seem to know that much about late 19th and early 20th century America. Pollution was worse then that is now around industrial areas. There was less tree cover in the eastern states, the banking system was frequently insolvent, with multiple bank runs. The economy was up and down and all over the place. There were huge job riots. In the early 20th century they desertified much of the farm land (dust bowl, which I expect to happen in China) and so on. The primary source of power was, indeed, coal, in the non-agrarian areas (in such areas it was wood.)

The two periods are not exact matches, but they are, in fact, very close to each other and the analogy is workable.

I wouldn't write of the Chinese. And I would be very careful of US triumphalism. Every hegemonic state goes into decline. The US can choose to live or die - and so far, the choices it has made seem to be mostly along the lines of those a dying nation takes, not one that is determined to live.

Oh, and the idea that US politicians or businessmen are getting much appropriate feedback is laughable. There's a damn near complete disconnect between how the majority of Americans are doing (no real raise in 30 years) and how America's elites are doing (rich, rich, rich - life has never been better). That's the root of the problems the US is having.

"Meiyou, meiyou" -- "None here, none here!" the petrol station attendant shouts, waving his arms at a small truck pulling up to the diesel pump to signal that it is dry.

Without stopping, the truck rolls on in search of the fuel elsewhere -- another casualty of the low-profile but intense battle between China's government and its increasingly independent oil firms over who should fund fuel subsidies.

The showdown has caused diesel shortages in parts of China's booming coastal province of Guangdong for weeks, according to drivers, gas station managers and industry sources, as refiners seek to staunch losses by reducing sales."

http://mauberly.blogspot.com/

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKHKG22863720070928

ye Graham; a fine lad ye are, ye are.

http://mauberly.blogspot.com/

I'm glad someone else caught that danger. I desperately hope that the planners took massive corruption into account and overdesigned the thing many many times a normal dam. A massive surge down the Yangtse (Yong-shay) would kill millions of people.

Forget it, Jake - it's AmnesiaTown

Too many young men with no future are a grave danger to any society. Starting a war is often a deliberate answer to this problem. China has had mass female-selective abortion for years now, and at some point the population of young men with no future AND no wives will be a serious destabilizer.

Siberia is unpopulated. Mongolia will soon be in the same position that Poland was in the thirties: in the way. And flat.

Forget it, Jake - it's AmnesiaTown

I was there 20 years ago and it was a mess then. Air pollution was awful...coal fired power plants. Rivers were polluted, there were no green spaces (northern China), and the only place you could find squirrels was in the zoo...people couldn't eat them there. I returned to the US with the one and only case of bronchitis I ever had. Was never so glad to get home as I was from that trip.

'I continue to be optimistic because I have watched the US be written off in every decade of my life, only to reinvent itself in some incredible, and unforseen fashion.'

http://mauberly.blogspot.com/

I have probably been around as long as either of you but I have never, until this moment, watched the US be written off by any even marginally credible analysis. Any earlier suggestions of our impending doom were for the obvious purpose of domestic fear mongering, i.e. missile crisis, education crisis, islamo fascist terrorist crisis, etc. etc, or for foreign ideological propaganda purposes.

If you want to argue that the US ability to reinvent itself gives you hope for the future, fine, but the above argument is, simply, absurd.

But what makes you think that the US now has the leadership, or other capacity to reinvent itself? What sort of reinvention do you think we have the capacity or the will for? What makes you think that decades of easy money gained by financializing everything in sight while ignoring real productive capacity and infrastructure enhancement is a habit that we are capable of giving up? What makes you think that the 8 years of bushic bullying will be easily forgiven by the rest of the world? What makes you think that we will actually quit our intemperate blustering ways so that we might actually make peace with the rest of the world and get back to doing business as relative equals?

I'm sorry but it just seems to me that we have picked up so many bad habits as a nation that it is hard to have the sort of hope that I would like to have and that you seem to have.

when the US was being written off because of the efficiency and productivity of Japan. The Japanese were supposed to be destined to eat our lunch back in the '80's.

The Japanese did eat our lunch back in the 1980s and I would argue that they've eaten our lunch into the early decade of the 21st Century. Whose automobiles and automotive industries are held up as world paragons of design, style and efficiency these days? It ain't the decrepit US auto industry by a long shot. The same applies to many other industries as well.

Japan has suffered because they contracted "victory disease" during the 1980s and were then unable to adapt well to their changing situation in the global economy. Plus, they haven't conducted labor arbitrage nearly as ruthlessly as the American corporations have done. With the Japanese banks burdened with the non-performing loans for real estate undertaken during the 1980s and 1990s and refusing to dump those loans and being tied very closely to manufacturing concerns as well, the Japanese economy has limped along while the US economy has, at least, crawled forward during the last fifteen years.

In 1990, Japan's economy was the only one which could threaten the US's economy in size, vibrancy, and sophistication. Today, we see at least four economies (Japan, China, India, and probably Russia) not to mention the EU, Brazil and the Pacific Tigers en toto who could challenge the US economy. We still continue to lose pace in terms of per capita income, so where did the forecasts go wrong?

Absurd is a good word, and it does seem worse than ever before. The 70's were awfully bad, in the 80's it was the endless discussion of the eclipse of the US by Japan (now its China). The 60's really really looked like we were going to simply implode, all our leaders being assassinated. Vietnam. A generation hooked on drugs. I don't know, is it worse now??

And we always have that replicator that could be invented. Followed by warp drive and di-lithium crystals to solve the energy crisis.

Crazy?? Yeah. But never in a million years did I envision the internet. Granted its morphed into blogs and shopping, but wow!! That came out of nowhere for me. Hybrid cars was off my radar. It's always what we don't expect.

So, I agree with every word you wrote, but keep a sort of 'Faith' I guess you'd call it.

were the social and economic turning points in the latest political/economic cycle--roughly the midpoint(s) of the period from ~1930 to ~2010. They were a time of upheaval, but one that was still contained within the larger governing structure. The struggles in these decades dictated which formerly outsider groups would be allowed into the still-robust power structure (if any).

The 80s saw the slow grinding down of the working class via trickle-down policies--the end result of the economic shocks of the 70s, where the working class lost and the rich won. The middle class also began to just tread water in the 80s. America started selling itself to the highest bidder, often Japan, while the rich got richer and consolidated their grasp on the downward half of the cycle.

The 90s was when offshoring got into full swing and manufacturing really started getting gutted. This was when we started selling our soul along with our bodies in order to keep the current order going. The internet boom was an attempt to reverse this situation and start bringing real wealth (not "financialized wealth") back into the country. The rich got richer, although the 'net bubble did lift some middle and working class boats too--until it popped.

The 00's are different. We are now at the end of our 70 to 80 year cycle and are in the crisis. The decisions made now are not made within the bounds of the pre-existing order. Rather, they are creating the next order that will last for 70 to 80 years. This is the period of time in which radical changes can (but do not have to) occur.

Think of the difference between pre-New Deal and post-New Deal America. How were politics different? People's relationship with the government? The economy? Center of power? Perception of the constitution and national character? People's liberties and freedoms? Etc.

Think of the difference between pre-Civil War and post-Civil War America. Same questions.

Think of the difference between pre-Revolution Colonial America and the post-Revolution American states. Same questions.

Those three times are the crisis periods that our nation has faced in the past. A crisis doesn't have to involve a war or massive depression, but it will create a change on the same order of magnitude. That is what we face in the 00's and going into the 10's. Unless the cycles have been broken (and I see nothing that clearly suggests they have been), we're in for a very interesting ride.

The scariest part is that Bush and conservatives in general have already charted such a strong (and disgusting) course for us.

as someone once said. The peak of Britain's power was probably 1870 to 1880. It wasn't till after 1945 that it went down. 65 years And yet the decline was clear by the early 1900's (or call it 45 years). The eighties actually did see some hollowing out and various problems, the 70s's were actually the start of the US's decline (I can show you a ton of charts where the trend lines turn completely ugly in the mid seventies).

But these things take time to play out. So far the trend lines have not reversed, and they're almost all pointing in bad directions.

Does that mean it's hopeless? Not at all. But the bucket is going to hit bottom, imo, before things can be turned around, because turning things around will require goring a lot of very powerful interests, and until there's real fear of revolution (as there was in the early thirties) real change won't be allowed.

As for the dollar - I defer to Numerian on the short run situation. In the longer run, it's toasty.

(and since almost all my income is in US dollars and since I think a high Canadian dollar is bad for Canada, I hope to hell Numerian is right. Could use a couple years of a lower Canadian dollar.)

What's the moral of the story you're telling? You really think the British people have had a horrible time of it for like, the last 50 years? Or what? They got bombed in WWII, they were in WWI because they were being punished for being a declining empire? Is that it? Lots of other countries were involved in those too. Or is it you're saying they were the only ones who really suffered the Depression? What is so bad that happened to them by losing empire status that hasn't happened to other first world countries as well? I can't think of anything. It's those under them when they were an empire that suffered, during and after. How have the British been so horribly punished? Looking at their example, I'd say "hopeless" doesn't even need to be brought up.

If you wanted to scare someone with the doom of falling empire, wouldn't the least you'd have to do is to use Germany or Japan's attempt at empire and what happened to them? But then you have the problem of that pesky Marshall Plan coming in there to mess up the doom thing in a few decades.

If our last reinvention was Clintonomics, Bush has sent us on a new path to a new economy. I do suggest ya'll take Naomi Klein's, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism seriously. I think she is on to something.

In short, there is a lot of money to be made in a world in which disaster production made inevitable by the very way we live. It is another form of the kind of auto-catalysis that has made so many rich and so many poor over the last 15 years. I say the re-invention as already taken place.

But how is this going to save us?

"Shock capitalism?" It won't. It will screw us over unless we happen to be among the top 1% or 0.1% of wealth.

But if you mean how is reading the book about it going to help us... Well, the first step is always identifying the problem.

is (might, could be) a huge growth economy which might further hasten the divide between the rich and the poor, further erode social capital, and feed of the body politic like carrion.

I have been responding to mauberly's "reinvention" language upthread. Just as the Clintonomics of the 90's was a destructive reinvention, I am arguing that we are entering a new level of destructive wealth creation. So, no it certainly will not save "us", but it will make a few people insanely rich, or richer.

But I have a memory. Man oh man. The 90's were great. Call it luck, call it whatever you want. Call it Clintonomics, but we had low cost energy, a budget surplus, a booming economy, new technologies, progressive taxation, falling crime rates, falling poverty rates. There was that brief period when academics were calling it the end of history. So you can lament those times if you want, but then I don't think there would ever be a time in history wherein you would be happy.

As far as it falling apart. Hey if I build a new house, it gets old things change. So solutions become future problems, welcome to the world. So solve the problems that emerge. That is what is wrong with Bush. He took away the progressive taxation, brought back deficits, brought back wasteful government spending (how ironic), filled the Government with hacks, destroyed FEMA, the Treasury, let the dollar fall, let inflation get out of control, got us in a stupid war, then keeps us there, should I go on??

It's funny, when you have a owner of a company and the company is doing great - then the owner is lucky. If you have an inept owner of a company and it goes down the tubes. Then it was always like that, there's a million reasons for things to fall apart. I can get up every day, go to work, work hard, accept my lot. Or I can drink all night, sleep in, get fired, and complain.

That is the 90's vs. the 00's.

Who would have thought that a guy who was basically a failure at everything he did his whole life would make such a lousy President.

I had a radically different reaction to the '90s. I was so disgusted I pretty much dropped out of the economy at the end of '95. I took the first 6 months of '96 off as a leave of absence, came back and worked 2 months and quit.

Clinton gave the country to the military. If he's so smart why didn't he see this coming. I could see this mess we're in in the Middle East coming since '74. I don't see why noone else did. 9/11 changed nothing for me.

I was a few months away from homelessness when I got another job in 2000. And I'm no wino. I think consumerism plays the role of Thunderbird for Americans. As long as we have it everything's OK. A big fall in the value of the dollar might be just what this country needs to set our priorities straight. I'll lose nothing I value. But then that's maybe what losers always say.

Disgusted with what exactly in 1995?

We had just had an oil war and we were doing nothing to eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. Everybody just went shopping.

Our military had gone crazy occupying countries around the world. We had an opportunity with the demise of the Soviet Union to reign them in and nothing was being done about it. It was obvious to me that our oil dependence was going to be used to keep military spending at WWII levels just like the "Red Menace" was. I even heard the VP for market for a British weapons manufacturer admit as much in a BBC interview 2 months before Saddam Husein invaded Kuwait. And everybody just went shopping.

I had always suspected that consumerism was immoral. Gulf War I removed all doubt. I ran out of excuses for consuming a job. The geopolitical and environmental consequences of "creating jobs" by manufacturing ever-increasing quantities of consumer goods were obviously going degrade our civilization and lead us into barbarism.

I could see this mess we're in in the Middle East coming since '74. I don't see why noone else did. -- Beto

Look at Carter's proposals in both energy and the Middle East. Unfortunately, "we have to solve some problems" was less compelling than "Morning in America! Tax cuts for everybody! Only change we need is to quit pampering the welfare queens!"

It's unfortunate that Carter wasn't a better actor.

Yeah, Carter was probably the best president in my lifetime (so far - dare I hope). I kind of wish I had voted for him. In '76, he was a shoo in and Gene McCarthy was running so I voted for Gene. In '80, the polls said he didn't have a chance because of the hostage crisis and I was disgusted with him for caving in to the Committee for the Present Danger (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perl, the Podhoretzes, etc) and increasing military spending so I voted Libertarian.

hot for a lot of people. It all depended where you sat. CErtainly it was better than the 80's, but that ain't saying much. For most people there were about 3 years in the late nineties where it was good for everyone. Otherwise, no.

Market Watch

LONDON (MarketWatch) -- This week's announcement that Dubai's investment company will take a 20% stake in the Nasdaq may have set off alarm bells in Congress, but it's probably just the beginning.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was especially quick to fire up his press operation and release a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson seeking assurance that the deal won't compromise U.S. national security.

However, as a political opportunity for Schumer and his ilk the Nasdaq deal has some problems. One is that Dubai is only acquiring 20% of the exchange, rather than a controlling interest. Another is that even the Bush administration is unlikely to be completely flat-footed for a second time on an issue that burned them so badly the first time around -- in the Dubai Ports fiasco.

And, political maneuvering aside, with the dollar at generational lows and headed lower, there is only so much the politicians can do anyway.

Middle Eastern and Chinese interests have hundreds of billions of dollars to invest.

I did inhale.

http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2175537,00.html

I did inhale.

all those vegetables you're growing.

http://mauberly.blogspot.com/