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Non-Tech : The Woodshed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: nspolar who wrote (15327)	10/24/2004 9:23:41 PM
From: SwampDogg	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 60899

Whenever you have the kind of bearish sentiment that you have towards the buck right now two things can happen: 1) The dollar can rally (the contrarian view) 2) The dollar can go a lot lower than even the bear think It is looking more and more like number 2 I am short the financials and retail and long gold. It will be interesting to see which side pays the best. Korea getting hit even harder than Tokyo

To: nspolar who wrote (15327)	10/24/2004 10:21:15 PM
From: ldo79	Respond to of 60899

Business India > New Delhi, Oct 23 : Gold prices zoomed to set a new record at Rs 6375 per ten gram on the bullion market today on brisk buying by stockists triggered by firm international trend on the back of crude oil scaling a record high. Trading volumes picked up amid marriage and festival buying as stockists purchased to enlarge their position, fearing the prices might go higher at overseas markets. Crude oil hitting a new high of 55.50 dollar a barrel mainly influenced the US dollar as investors shifted their interest toward bullion, considering silver and gold a safe haven during such crisis. The yellow metal, which had set a record at Rs 6350 per ten gram on January 6 this year, crossed this level on October 9 before setting a fresh record today. Traders said weak dollar and strong oil prices made nervous investors to avoid inflation and go in for the dollar-denominated yellow metal. PTI 123bharath.com

To: nspolar who wrote (15327)	10/24/2004 10:25:40 PM
From: ldo79	Respond to of 60899

Protect your assets from a US dollar collapse The US dollar has been weakening against the major currencies in the past week. Some analysts are beginning to wonder if this is not the start of a big correction to rebalance the trade deficit. But how can holders of US-denominated assets protect themselves? Sell out of US assets while you still can, and buy precious metals! This might appear an extreme reaction to a few days of bad trading for the US dollar – which is now at a seven-month low against the euro – but devaluation is an invidious thing. Just consider how much poorer you are if you have held on to US dollar assets since the year 2000. The dollar has moved from 82 cents to $1.26 to the euro and has lost 60% of its value against an ounce of gold. Where you feel this most is as a traveler. The US dollar just does not buy as much in terms of hotel rooms and meals as it used to do. It also means that if you wanted to buy a house in Europe then you would get a much smaller one than in 2000 for the same money. So if you are sat on a US dollar bank account bad luck! But it might still make sense to convert your savings into a currency or asset more likely to stand up to the pressures of devaluation. Indeed, once the US Presidential Election is out of the way on November 2 economic reality will begin to close in on the USA. The twin deficits are unsustainable, and that means the US economy will have to tighten its belt. This can be done by higher taxes and interest rates, or by devaluation, or more likely a combination of both. However, if like most Gulf State investors you live a dollar zone, then it is difficult to avoid the impact of devaluation entirely. Your income, for example, will probably be in US dollar-equivalent currency, and your local investments will be dollar-denominated. It is a pretty sobering exercise to take, for instance, recent local stock market profits in the GCC and revalue them to constant 2000 dollars. What seems like a big profit becomes very much smaller. On the other hand, if you live in a dollar zone and spend your income locally then devaluation means little, except that inflation is likely to pick-up sharply for goods and services. The message is pretty simple nonetheless. US dollar deposit holders should consider shifting to safer currencies. Likewise holders of US stocks and bonds should liquidate them and move to a safe haven such as gold or the Swiss franc. For the honeymoon for the next US President in financial markets is likely to be very brief. ameinfo.com

To: nspolar who wrote (15327)	10/24/2004 10:31:56 PM
From: ldo79	Respond to of 60899

Minews Story Date: October 25, 2004 Stop Press!!! India Puts The Boot Into US Dollar. No it wasn’t hindsight. Minews was sitting on Eurostar on the way to Paris last weekend when his eye was drawn to a headline in the Pinker than Pink ‘Un which read as follows. “India to dip into forex reserves to build roads.” Looks innocuous enough, but it was the signal long awaited that the US dollar would finally crack. For a long time now India, China, Japan and a number of other countries have been reinvesting the dollars they have been paid for exports in low yielding US Treasury bonds. India has around US$120 billion foreign exchange reserves and most of that is in these bonds which have been depreciating against the euro, pound and yen. The scales have now dropped from their eyes and the Indian government is going to spend a goodly part of this money on roads, rail systems and power stations. Now that one country has come to its senses, others will follow as it dawns that they are simply subsidising the US economy at their own cost by holding these bonds. India’s reserves have tripled in the last three years, and the authorities need to find a way to attract more inward investment. Infrastructure is the key to an improvement in annual growth and the costs of improvement cannot be met out of public spending. One week later and back on home territory Minews scans the Saturday Financial Times. Sure enough the currency column is headlined, “The greenback could be on the edge of a cliff”. During the week the dollar moved out of a trading range against the euro it had maintained since March and fell 1.2 per cent to US$1.2630. This is only a whisker away from the US$1.2930 which was the 7 year low recorded in February. Chartists are already pointing further into the gloom that we have been expecting for some time. The huge US current account deficit is hardly going to disappear with the economy slowing down, and high oil prices will kibosh any imminent recovery. India will not be the only country watching events unfold.. China’s foreign exchange reserves are many times larger and we have pointed out on a number of occasions that it holds the future of the US dollar in the palm of its hand. Nevertheless it needs the greedy US consumer to go on buying its goods, so will have to play its currency reserve cards quite carefully. Gradually the world will awaken to just how far the geo-political axis has moved to the east. Last week we carried a piece by Anthony Hilton of the London Evening Standard predicting that in twenty years’ time the renminbi could have supplanted the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. As things are going now twenty years could be an over-estimate. Watch out for metals traders giving prices in euros rather than dollars and keep an eye on gold as valued in sterling. These are interesting times and we are in new territory.. minesite.com