As some of you may know, I’ve been planning to emigrate for quite some time but have recently had my plans blown to pieces by the massive devaluation of the dollar relative to other world currencies, so i’ve been paying attention to currency markets more then i normally would.   Today though I learned something new, something that made me sit up in my seat and say WTF?  A new article from the christian science monitor on american foreign debt reveals something I’ve never heard befor about our national debt and currency values.  peep game:

The US is an entrepôt, says Jane D’Arista, of the Financial Markets Center, Philomont, Va. That is, it takes in savings from the world at relatively low cost and invests some of that money abroad at a higher return.

There’s more to the mystery than that, however. One advantage for the US is that the dollar is the primary currency used in international reserves of other nations and for invoicing international trade and investment, such as for oil and other commodities.

So when the dollar loses value, foreign holders of dollar assets lose on their dollar investments. Almost all US foreign liabilities are in dollars and about 70 percent of US foreign assets are in foreign currencies.In what Gourinchas calls an “eye-catching, back-of-the-envelope calculation,” a 10 percent depreciation of the dollar represents a transfer of 5.3 percent of US GDP from the rest of the world to the US. America’s GDP is currently $13.7 trillion, and the dollar is down 20.6 percent since 2002. So foreigners have – in effect – given the US about $1.3 trillion.

The Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 29, 2007.  Article by David R. Francis.

So the more the US dollar slides in value the more wealth is transfered back to US banks, helping to offset the massive national defecit that’s been racked up by the war in Iraq.  In other words, the massive fall in the value of the dollar that’s gone on over the past few years, a slide that’s driven the prices on the consumer goods through the roof, is actually directly tied to the war.  Since working class people spend a far larger percentage of their incomes on consumer goods and own far fewer investments then rich people do, that translates into a massive systematic transfer of wealth from poor and working class Americans to wealthy Americans.   If you’ve wondered why the prices of groceries and everything else keep rising, there’s your answer.

Yet another way the bush administrations policies have screwed the majority of americans over royally.

Posted: October 31st, 2007 under economics.
Comments: 1

first off, check this out: http://www.betaruce.com/java/life/applet/

one of the most frustrating things about animals, humans included, is that their populations will pretty much always expand to the biggest size possible until they are restrained in some way. in nature (or, more accurately, that portion of nature which does not include humans) animal populations are restricted by access to food and predators. among human populations the big limiters are economics (ie access to food) and warfare (ie predators). funny how that works, ain’t it? Read more »

Posted: October 13th, 2007 under economics, science and history.
Comments: 4

a fairly decent video from 20/20 on discrimination against athiests in america.

and here’s an article from the daily herald about christians vandalizing some poor girl’s house because she stood up for herself in a student council meeting.

there are thousands more stories like this, I just ran into these two back-to-back and figured I should throw something up about it. something similar happened to me back when I was in high school, not as extreme as this, but along the same lines. I won’t go into the details, but when I went and talked to the principle at my school about it the response was first “do you know who did it?” and when I said no it was “well then we’re not going to waste time looking into it, we’re too busy.” now I ask you, if it had been a religious student getting targeted for harassment, don’t you think they might have bothered to, i dunno, at least pretend to investigate? hell, they’d probably devote a staff training day to it and throw a special assembly to preach tolerance!

but then i suppose that shows the weakness of our political system, hate crimes only count as hate crimes when the victims have the potential to swing elections (jews, christians, black folks, women, gay people in some places like san francisco but not in places where they’re an invisible minority, and so on.).   Athiests, agnostics, pagans, and others who don’t buy into any of the abrahamic religions are such a tiny minority in america that they can simply ignore us and trample on our rights without fear of any consequences.

for now.

Posted: October 13th, 2007 under gods & religion, politrix.
Comments: none