Barron's, Alan Abelson snippet
IN OUR BRIEF EXEGESIS OF WHY OIL has been acting as if some practical jokester gave it a hot foot that has sent it in panicky flight to the moon, we deliberately neglected to mention the dollar as a leading suspect. In the main, we suppose, because it's both so evident and widely recognized as a causal agent, but also because we've cited it long and often as the root of so many of our ills that it might seem just a tad repetitious, which it is.
Yet we can't resist taking still another swipe at the dark forces that have conspired to debase the ragged greenback and, in the process, contrived to make life miserable in so many ways for the denizens of this fair land. As Peter Schiff, who runs Euro Pacific Capital, tartly observes in his latest epistle, it's too bad that the Supreme Court, in ruling that U.S currency is unfair to the blind, failed to also declare it unfair to everyone who buys gasoline.
To Peter, the big move in crude and gasoline is symptomatic of the bill that has come due for years of reckless consumption and dollar devaluation that have priced us out of markets to which we once held "unchallenged title." Signs of America's falling standard of living are everywhere, he laments.
And he posits that the current round of belt-tightening is "simply the down payment on the government's massive bailout of Wall Street investment banks and mortgage lenders." And he morosely predicts, "As the Fed creates money to buy bad mortgages and other shaky securities held by banks and brokerage firms, the value of the savings and wages" of us poor slobs will continue to shrivel.
That means that the cost of a good many more of the things that we take for granted will shoot up. "Four dollar gasoline," he warns, "is just the beginning."
Even so, Happy Memorial Day! |
