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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: quehubo who wrote (127873)	3/30/2004 7:26:02 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi quehubo; Re: "Bilow, our economic power will continue to grow because of our values, our institutions, our national resources, and the people we are able to attract here in the USA." Then why has our economic power gone up and down in the past? Maybe you're talking about the very long term, where our economic power has tended to increase. But if you are looking at the very long term, there are plenty of examples of countries which had economic power that increased for centuries and then declined for centuries more. By your logic, the economic power of China must be growing because of their values, LOL. Oh, it's not? The problem with debating people who have cast loose from the mooring of reality is that they make everything a special case, so there can be no general argument. In this case, you're treating the US as a special case, somehow separate from the laws that govern economic behavior of other countries. Sort of like how the Germans under Hitler believed that they were ubermensch(sp). Re: "But you skirted your mistake, that our growing economic power by mistaking our increasing demand for energy as a sign of economic decline." If we were driving up the price of oil by using large amounts of it, then the price of oil would be going up for everyone in the world, not just for us. That's because oil is a commodity. Do I have to spell this out for you? Half the world is talking about pricing oil in Euros so that they don't have to hang it on the falling dollar: globalpolicy.org OPEC is considering a move away from using the U.S. dollar — and to the euro — to set its price targets for crude oil, the highest-profile manifestation of the debilitating effect of depreciation on the greenback's standing as the currency of international commerce. ... They have seen their purchasing power in Europe pinched as the U.S. dollar loses ground against the euro — including touching a record low Monday. ... Indeed, while OPEC has yet to make any formal break with the U.S. dollar, its refusal to boost output has already offloaded much of the cost of the dollar's depreciation on to the American economy. Mr. Gobert said oil prices at the end of last month, about $32 (U.S.) a barrel, would have been much lower if not for the decline in the value of the U.S. dollar over the past 24 months. Using the exchange rates of the dollar versus the euro two years ago, crude would be selling for $22 a barrel instead, he said. ... globeandmail.com In the past 2 years, the value of the Euro has gone from 0.85 to 1.25 dollars. Over that same period, the price of oil went from about $20 to $32. So the price of oil, in Euros, only went from 23.5E to 25.6E, hardly a change at all. Here are the charts: futures.tradingcharts.com futures.tradingcharts.com This isn't rocket science. We're paying a higher price because our currency is dropping. It's inflation, nothing more, nothing less. If it were oil going up in price because it's scarce, then it would be going up in price all over the world because oil is a commodity. It is possible to take your point of view, but to do so, you have to provide an explanation for why it is that oil is getting cheaper in other parts of the world. I guess you could say that their currencies are going up in value because they're just a bunch of obsolete cheese and chocalate making countries, LOL, but that wouldn't buy you any better a dose of reality than the theory that Iraq was filled to the gills with WMDs. Re: "The price is going higher in part because the USA has an increasing demand for a commodity that is scarce." Great theory, but you don't have much data to back it up. Here's the figures for world production of oil from 2002 through 2003, straight from the US government, and US imports of oil (millions of barrels per day): World US Prod. imp. 1995 69 17 1996 71 18 1997 74 19 1998 75 19 1999 74 20 2000 77 20 2001 77 20 2002 76 20 2003 79 20 All figures: eia.doe.gov The government's own figures show that the US oil imports, as a percentage of world production, are quite steady while world production is increasing. -- Carl