> http://bullnotbull.com/archive/dow13k-1.html
My personal prediction is that it's much easier for currency to inflate
than for housing prices to significantly decline.
Looking from the outside, much of the climb in the Dow has been a reaction
to the decline of the dollar -- just for the value to hold steady, the
former must goes up as the latter goes down.
In the 70's (back when cheney was last in the white house), all the US
inflation was blamed on those Ay-rabs and their oil. Assuming wars were
financed then as they are now, I wonder how much of it was simply due to
finally having to pay, for real, the bill on fighting in Vietnam?
(belligerence and bonds never mixed well over c20)
I can easily call the current US administration cheats and liars. I
probably can't call them thieves. But I can say that, in real, or at
least EUR vs. USD (not even barrels of oil) terms, they may have managed
to chop more than 10 trillion USD off national wealth over the last 6
years. Everybody calls .-bomb a bubble, but at least all the stupidities
of the "new economy" were committed by people trying to offer win-win
games. This administration believes in playing lose-lose (at least as
long as they can grab a bigger piece of a smaller pie) yet nobody calls
"bubble" on them.
That rant having been made, I'll point out that my parents remind me from
time to time that the situation in the old country is never as bad as it
might seem from reading the papers. I really don't expect the US to face
an acute crash, especially if saner politics prevail, but wouldn't be at
all surprised if the chronic adjustment to a world without throwaway
energy proves more painful there than elsewhere. Structural adjustments
are not generally so liquid as financial.*
Neither my wife nor I have any need or intention to emigrate to the US.
I am always amused when I follow google news links to parochial papers who
seem to believe that because I have a non-US IP address I am going to be
interested in clicking on green card ads.
However I was weighing the "educational opportunity" options for my kids
in the US. This article has firmed up my mind.
How old are your kids? University-age?
-Dave
:: :: ::
* I spoke with an argentine a little while ago who told me about how they
could have bank deposits in pesos or dollars, and one day, the government
said that all dollar deposits were to be converted 1:1 to peso deposits.
At least there, people thought they'd had the option to have accounts in
something other than pesos; try opening a non-dollar account in the states
sometime!
