"Undermining my electoral viability since 2001."

The End Is Nigh

Want to know a sign that the Big D is on the way? Watch the money:

bq. Canada's dollar traded almost equal to the U.S. currency for a second day amid optimism economic growth will be fueled by surging demand for the commodities... The currency rose above $1 yesterday for the first time since November 1976.

Currently it's a $0.999. Meanwhile, as atrios has noted, the Euro is closing in on a buck fiddy. Fed Chairman Bernake says the worst has yet to come:

bq. Losses from sub-prime mortgages have far exceeded "even the most pessimistic estimates", US Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke has said.

And then (via Franz) there's this:

bq. Saudi Arabia has refused to cut interest rates in lockstep with the US Federal Reserve for the first time, signalling that the oil-rich Gulf kingdom is preparing to break the dollar currency peg in a move that risks setting off a stampede out of the dollar across the Middle East.

I've been following all this in my own nerdy way, and it looks like most of the bullish pushback against claims of instability are evaporating. Our debt-based economy can't roll on much longer as currently configured.

The upside for me is that I work in an international market on a product that has a very strong European base, so all of a sudden I'm cheap labor to those people. Heck, I may be cheap labor to those socialists up in Canada soon.

I also welcome a more relaxed US economy in some ways, especially if we can avoid true big-D pains, get through some FDR-style Public Good stuff and level out some of the vast inequality we have. I mean, we don't really need all this crap. I think we could have a much more Free society if we had more time off of work to spend sharing culture and building community...

Responses

I made this post while it was going on. Back in mid august the "big-D" kinda did hit. After the last one the world banks put a few safe guards in place in case it should ever happen again.

They would be able to rapidly inject massive amounts of money into the market to prevent a panic and things cascading to a full on disaster.

Thing about that kind of tactic is you can only really use it a couple of times before its all used up.

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