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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (12295)	12/30/2001 9:07:25 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74559

re: weaker dollar: "Weaker" is a relative term. If the dollar is to weaken, then you must answer the question: weaker than what? If investors don't want to hold dollars or dollar-denominated assets, then there must be an alternative. If there is no alternative........then the dollar won't weaken. Whatever recession the U.S. is going to have, it's going to be worse in Japan. Wherever unemployment crests in the U.S., it's going to be higher in Europe. And more Argentina-type events forces assets out of pesos and argentinos and other distrusted paper printed by distrusted governments, and moves those assets into..........dollars, the Safe Haven. So, there is really no currency which has any realistic chance of replacing the dollar. Not now, not next year, anyway. Which leaves gold, and "hard" assets in general. And gold isn't going to take off until we get either large deflation or large inflation. Maybe that happens, but it hasn't happened yet, in spite of all the shocks since October 1998. The dollar has been amazingly resilient. If I had listed for you, in early 1998, all the disasters that were going to happen in the next 4 years, you and the other DoomAndGloomers would have been sure the combination of all those stresses would have caused a Collapse Of Confidence, the Big Cahuna. Yet I look around me, and I don't see any Collapse. The Storm is being weathered well. Almost everyone I know pays their taxes, goes to church, makes their kids do their homework, pays their mortgage, is employed, and generally lives a peaceful and productive life. And is very secure that they'll be doing the same next year, and the year after and the decade after. And I think they're right; it isn't just bravado. I, too, see the endless trade deficits and ever-higher debt loads (government, corporate, and personal) as incompatible (in the longterm) with a strong dollar. But, given the total absence of any viable alternative, I think the dollar will stay strong, for the foreseable future, 2002 at least.

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (12295)	12/31/2001 12:28:04 AM
From: marcos	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

The european young like being european ... my evidence for this entirely anecdotal - we get a lot of tourists out here on the canadian left coast, some of us are involved with a multicultural centre and through that a youth hostel, we get called out for emergencies and special events and translation etc, so we meet a lot of 19-25 year old europeans among others ... one of the questions i often ask is 'how do you like having a european passport?' [as opposed to a danish/irish/whatever passport] ... actually i always ask this, the question in light of the continent's history fascinates me ..... the answer is invariably - 'yes i like it very much, it's quite practical you know, we can go from Cádiz to Rostock and it is all one', or something like that ... then, almost as invariably - 'there are more of us than there are of you in North America, you know' Whether this means they'll make a long-term go of the euro, hard to say ... but i suspect so ... there is a definite change in attitude from people i've known in the past, for instance a frenchman born probably 1938 or so, when in the 1980s he was issued a red euro passport instead of the [blue?] french one, it rocked his world, he didn't like it one bit, complained at great length and did in fact use the epithet 'boche' [which is why i ask all europeos that question now, really]