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by Charles Carreon
5:01 pm, March 26, 2005
People like to bandy about that the Eskimos have a hundred words for
snow. Presumably Colombians have as many to describe cocaine. Certainly
the money-users of the world have come up with as many names for money as
there are for the most popular illicit substances. People call money a lot
of things — bread, cash, moolah, scratch, dead presidents. But the names
that people have been using to describe the dollar recently are more like
expletives of the financial sort.
Americans are being asked to take more of an interest in our currency.
European bankers urge our bankers to get us to be better world citizens,
and earn a somewhat larger fraction of what we spend. Are we being urged
to be more productive, and sell more goods and services to the rest of the
world? If so, perhaps some rethinking is in order, because it's hard to
imagine how America could do more to drive the world economy, and if it’s
going to continue in the same vein, the world probably can’t afford any
more of this economic stimulus.
The Bush doctrine has thrown industrial production worldwide into
overdrive by literally blowing up high-tech equipment in the desert, when
we’re not driving Humvees and trucks around the dunes using up gas and
diesel, driving up the worldwide price of oil. Sales of armaments are
increasing worldwide, and now that the proliferation barn door has been
left open, the costly search to track and recover wayward fissionable
material that might be utilized to set off unauthorized nuclear strikes is
on. What with peace breaking out in Palestine, perhaps the Israelis can
get busy selling, rather than deploying, missiles, bombs, and other
munitions. This worldwide, high-tech, heavy-metal, rocking out comes at
some cost. Sun Tzu said “It takes five pounds of food to deliver one pound
of food to soldiers in the field.” The ratio in Iraq is without doubt more
like a thousand-to-one, if you think about how cheap it would have been to
leave all those young people back in America and feed ‘em Big Macs right
in their home town. Commodity prices are rising worldwide, as always rise
in wartime, and Uncle Sam's current wars incredibly wasteful. Killing is
expensive, especially when the victims are being killed individually, one
carload at a time, as in Iraq.
High tech has heard the word that terrorism is the new cold war, giving
a mammoth boost to biometric technology that will give us — more expensive
driver's licenses! SAIC, the San Diego foundation for the preservation of
defense industry power and influence in technology, has wasted $180
Million trying to make a computer system for the FBI. I could have told
them they’d never pull it off because a computer system can’t run on booze
and bullshit. Information sellers like ChoicePoint and Lexis-Nexis are
also bringing the economics of the information economy more clearly into
focus. We've even given a boost to the drug industry by insulating the
world's largest pharmaceutical market from competition under the guise of
a “senior prescription drug plan.”
Meanwhile, the magical production of money from the housing market by a
succession of refinances driven by the lowest interest rates in U.S.
history, and the sale of a new truck to every fool smart enough to know
that zero percent interest means what it says, has just about run out of
room to expand. The constraints on that expansion are felt whenever the
amount of money America borrows drops perilously close to equal
to or less than the total amount of money America owes to other countries.
Whenever that happens, the dollar drops in value, unless there are
compensating factors moving it in the other direction.
Of course, I say the dollar drops in value, but with respect to Chinese
money, this is not true. China has declared that its currency, the Rnimbi,
shall trade against the USD at a fixed rate. How friendly this is. Our
friend China is willing to insist that, even though the European Central
Bank, the Swiss, the Japanese, the Canadians, etcetera, all have dropped
their valuations of the dollar, our money is worth as much to them as
ever. Incredible resilience the Chinese show! American politicians call
them godless communists and all manner of horrendous ethnic slurs, and
only grudgingly admit them to the World Trade Organization, and interfere
with all of their efforts to buy high tech weapons from Israel and South
Africa and Eurpoean nations. In return, they lend us all the money we are
willing to spend on flat screens, hard drives, cell phones, athletic
shoes, and all manner of other treasures. Why? Because nobody else,
besides the Japanese, of whom there are appallingly few, and even fewer
reproducing, can figure out how to use these gadgets!
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