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

To: Snowshoe who wrote (21912)	8/1/2002 4:35:13 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Snowshoe, how about a tax on imported crude oil or refined products? That would do the same thing and would penalize the OPEC gang while reducing fuel consumption, pollution, encouraging local production or alternative technologies, blah blah blah... Mqurice

To: Snowshoe who wrote (21912)	8/1/2002 4:48:24 AM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

>>but it would be nice to avoid all that fuss and bother by reducing our imports. << I dont know what's the proportion of energy in US imports. I just feel that the majority of the consumers would feel it like an affront to be asked or cajoled to move to fuel-efficient cars - "You mean, I cant afford it anymore? Watch me!" In any case the level of imports seems to be unsustainable, so a decrease is in the books, I just dont know on what time scale and in what fashion (boom or bust;?). Of course the reduction in the current account deficit maps pretty much 100% into a significant decrease in consumer spending. With app 70% of US GDP being the achievement of the consuming J6P, a decrease in consumer spending means a drop in GDP (and I mean drop, not a drop in the growth rate). I will not bnring up any R-words at this point. In any case, I dont see any alternative to this scenario. Any ideas? dj

To: Snowshoe who wrote (21912)	8/1/2002 7:58:31 AM
From: Don Lloyd	Respond to of 74559

Snowshoe, Don, I'm halfway serious. There are strong economic, environmental, and national security reasons for reducing the consumption of energy. I wish the various conflicting interests would agree to a common framework for dealing with this. There is only one framework that can work, and that is a free market economy. Price must be allowed to allocate supply and profits must be allowed to channel development of alternate sources. No government subsidy development plan has ever worked or can ever work and it always ends up preventing otherwise viable technologies from inching into widespread use while generating private profits. Environmental problems are primarily the result of a lack of private property rights and the economic incentives to protect them. Publicly owned properties have the worst pollution, etc., and public regulators have only political incentives to modulate their actions. Security problems are the result of government regulation and price controls. In a truly free market, there would be dozens of sources of dozens of types of energy, all supplying the subsets of demand for which they were best suited, and all of the sources would dynamically be operating at levels which result in roughly equal levels of profitability and ROI over time through competition for investment funds. No one source would dominate to such a degree that relatively moderate price changes couldn't handle any interruptions. On this thread we are quite interested in the U.S. trade imbalance and it's effect on dollar stability. Jay is actively scheming at ways to get rich in a usd meltdown, but it would be nice to avoid all that fuss and bother by reducing our imports. Right now all those SUVs guzzling gas in traffic jams are contributing to our balance of payments problem. Balance of payment problems are measurement problems. Every single import and export transaction represents a self-perceived benefit to each counterparty. The only exceptions are for exchanges that are the result of government interventions, subsidies and tariffs. Yes, exchange rates will dynamically adjust, but every currency collapse is the result of bad government policy, usually an inflationist monetary policy, not a trade adjustment. Regards, Don

To: Snowshoe who wrote (21912)	8/1/2002 9:48:38 AM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Hi Snowshoe, I am back in HK. I will post my prepared response to retired's question on my USD exposure (large) tomorrow. <<Jay is actively scheming at ways to get rich in a usd meltdown>> In the meantime I would be interested in any other scheme where I can get less poor in a USD rise, against all the monetary and fiscal obligations, built up in the past, stretching into the future, in light of the now better known facts concerning the phooey nature of the New Economy. As the USD came down, the media tried to make for a case where US export will benefit, especially going to Europe. Well, it turns out that Europe will suffer from a credit crunch, so we can scratch that plan. The cataclysm is global in nature, no one will escape, all will suffer, either by lost income, busted nest eggs, foreclosed homes, inflation of service prices, deflation of manufacturing businesses, in all currencies, in sequence, in parallel, but in line. Chugs, Jay