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Sourc e
April 30, 2007 -- Former global currency markets player and current day philanthropist George Soros warned recently that the growing trade imbalance between the United States and China represents the biggest threat of an international economic collapse
He added that the decline in the dollar's value could accelerate if central banks and foreign investors were spooked into switching their cash reserves into other currencies.
"What is now a very gentle decline in the dollar could accelerate and that could be disruptive," added Soros, who was speaking at a debate in Prague connected with his book "The Age of Fallibility."
The single European currency is developing into a counterweight to the dollar, with rich Gulf oil states choosing to keep some of their surplus cash in euros. But that trend also risks creating "serious disruption" if it develops outside current acceptable bounds, Soros said.
Originally posted by etotheitheta
What does Bill Gates know?
Originally posted by Mdv2
Conservative economist Bruce Bartlett accused President Bush of "bankrupting" America and betraying the Reagan legacy in an interview on PBS's Tavis Smiley Show on Tuesday.
A domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan and a treasury official under President George H.W. Bush, Bartlett assailed Bush's "big government conservatism" and said he was surprised at Bush's policies, despite his campaign pledge to be a "compassionate conservative."
"In 2000 I thought that was election year rhetoric," said Bartlett. "I didn't think it meant anything. I learned the hard way as a lot of us did what he really meant it when he talked about compassionate conservatism."
When asked how the current President Bush compared to his father, Bartlett responded, "If I didn't know with a certainty they were related, I wouldn't think that they were."
Source
The U.S. dollar is under the greatest attack since it became the new American nation's official currency more than 200 years ago.
The greenback has become the victim of a two-pronged pincer motivated by geopolitical antagonism on the one hand, plus the growing belief that America's currency is no longer the prime investment it once was.Even America's vaunted political stability no longer carries the premium that it once did, when most of the world was looking for a safe financial haven.
This turn of events is happening at a bad time because the U.S. Treasury has become increasingly dependent on the $1.5 trillion annually paid by America's population for the massive imports into its escalating consumer and industrial economy.
....
The current shift to the euro started with Russia. As President Vladimir Putin put it, "Russian oil and natural gas is traded all over the world, so why are we selling it for dollars when we get less and less. For euros we get more and more."
Most of Russia's natural gas goes to Europe and is now being priced in euros, not dollars. Iran has followed suit for obviously hostile reasons, with the United Arab Emirates following right behind. Even Saudi Arabia, America's dubious ally, has begun demanding euros for many of its oil contracts for the first time.
China, which is sitting on $1 trillion in currency reserves, has just set up a special fund to plow $50 billion into euros, global commodities and other non-dollar assets.Banca d'Italia just slashed its dollar reserves from 84 percent to 64 percent.
Even some emerging countries are switching from the dollar to the euro. Indonesia has switched $1.9 billion out of the dollar, and little Ecuador, which recently elected a socialist president, dumped $2.3 billion from its national reserves, converting to competing currencies.
Originally posted by etotheitheta
What does Bill Gates know?
Originally posted by Mdv2
Tip: perhaps you should start reading the thread to find out? It's not only Bill Gates, the number of economists, politicians and investors supporting the claim that the America is on the edge of bankruptcy is growing by day.
Bloomberg
May 7 (Bloomberg) -- Anyone who says the dollar is weak after it fetched a record-low $1.3681 against the euro and the fewest pence against the pound in 25 years is expressing a euphemism.
The currency may decline at least another 10 percent by the end of 2008, say Jay Bryson, an economist at Wachovia Corp., and Kenneth Rogoff, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. The dollar has only fallen 3.4 percent in the past two years to a 10-year low, according to a Federal Reserve index that weighs trade with 38 countries including China, Mexico, Canada and countries in Europe. It tumbled 30 percent in the three years ended 1988.
``Dollar weakness will be broad-based and could last for years,'' said Bryson, a global economist at Charlotte, North Carolina-based Wachovia who previously analyzed currencies at the Federal Reserve.
Investors are dumping dollars, lured by higher returns elsewhere. The U.S. will grow more slowly than Europe for the first time since 2001 and Japan for the first time in 16 years, the IMF forecasts. The difference in yield between 10-year German bonds and Treasuries has shrunk to the smallest since 2004.
Originally posted by MINDoverFAITH
Well anyone remember that article about china giving threats to just dump their 1 trillion in ameircan dollars?
Originally posted by Johnmike
China wasn't aiming nukes at us during the Cold War.
Full Article
FRANKFURT: Finance ministers and central bankers have long fretted that at some point, the rest of the world would lose its willingness to finance the United States' proclivity to consume far more than it produces - and that a potentially disastrous free-fall in the dollar's value would result.
But for longer than most economists would have been willing to predict a decade ago, the world has been a willing partner in American excess - until a new and home-grown financial crisis this summer rattled confidence in the country, the world's largest economy.
...
"This is all pointing to a greatly increased risk of a fast unwinding of the U.S. current account deficit and a serious decline of the dollar," said Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and an expert on exchange rates. "We could finally see the big kahuna hit."
In addition to increased nervousness about the pace of the dollar's decline, many currency analysts now also are willing to make an argument they would have avoided as recently as a few years ago: that the euro should bear the brunt of the dollar's decline.
Source
Homeless people living in cars and motorhomes across the US are being joined by a new breed: the middle class.
As mortgage foreclosures continue to rise, growing numbers of middle-class professionals are losing their homes and downsizing from four bedrooms to four wheels.
With numbers rising, New Beginnings, a homeless agency in Santa Barbara, California, has launched a safe parking scheme, whose aim is to provide a refuge of sorts for those who have nowhere to go other than their vehicle.
Guy Trevor lost his job as an interior designer when the sector contracted thanks to the foreclosure crisis. With his furniture sold and his belongings in storage, he now lives in his car, spending the nights in one of the 12 gated car parks in Santa Barbara run by New Beginnings.