On Wed, 3 Oct 2007, Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: To: futurework <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>A less positive take on the rise of our dollar. > >Ed > >------------------------------------------------------------------------- > >A Black Day in Canada's Economic History > >By Buzz Hargrove > >Some were popping champagne corks yesterday over the loonie's >attainment of full U.S.-dollar parity. But their celebration was >misguided. > >Yesterday was a black day in Canada's economic history. Our dollar's >rise to parity is a symbolic milestone of the triumph of paper mania >over economic reality. Far from celebrating, we should be thinking >about new ways to stop it, and reverse it. > >The loonie's flight has been driven by a distorted, unbalanced boom in >oil exports, and a corresponding surge of foreign takeovers of Canadian >resource companies. The appreciation benefits just a small, specialized >minority of Canadians: retailers, some investors, and snowbirds. For >most of us, the high-flying dollar does much more harm than good. Our >wealth comes from what we produce, not from paper. And the dollar's >rise badly undermines what we do. Buzz has unfortunately an americentric view of the world, due to his position as union head in the autopact sector, which is welded to the US market. In fact, if you look at the performance of the CAD against the Euro (for instance, go to http://free.charts.xe.com/misc/xe.asp?ref=freechart and under File>Change Symbol>EUR/CAD; under Time Scale>Daily>Ten Years) you will see that it is trading at a middling level, and in fact was stronger in the spring of last year. So the $CDN isn't rising at all, as we are surely all aware, it's just that the $US is sinking. ...And his proposal to engineer violence to the Canadian economy in order to drive our currency down with the $US will bring his members short term benefits at the cost of making canadian industry direly undervalued, and thus far more vulnerable to the foreign takeovers he's worried about (although I doubt that the methods he suggests will actually have that effect, at least not in the degree he hopes...). Makes no sense to me at all. -Pete _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list Futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
