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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (233976)	5/20/2005 10:58:06 PM
From: Road Walker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576180

re: Yes they are a problem and can cuase other problems but they aren't a disaster at this point and unless they get much worse they aren't going to sink the US. For someone that can't spell you have a lot of confidence. You have a tendency to take issues that are open to debate by the greatest minds in the world and state your opinion as if it was pure fact. At some point, it would be nice if you backed it up with data, or at least some of your twisted logic. Maybe the twin deficits are not a "sustained twin deficit".

To: TimF who wrote (233976)	5/21/2005 12:03:57 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576180

"and now "our spending in Iraq isn't going to sink a $14tril economy" Sink is too strong of a word. But the distinction is pretty moot when stagflation is hitting high gear and you are confronting the misery index, up front and personal. The thing that you have to realize is that the US economy doesn't exist in isolation. True, our current spendthrift habits don't reach levels in the past, on a percentage level. That isn't the relevant metric. The relevant metric is when the rest of the world starts to decide they don't want to bankroll us any more. We are there now. Unless we can cut our dependence on foreign investment, we are in dire straits. Ok, let's look at a historical fact. Until the early '70s the dollar was pegged at 1/35th of an ounce of gold. That pretty much fixed the exchange rate of dollars to anything else, all currencies were pegged to the dollar. By 1971 the trade deficit had grown so large because of this linkage, we abandoned the system. The European economies had finally recovered from WWII to the point that our trade deficit was killing us. So Nixon did the expedient thing, he cut the linkage between the dollar and gold. That meant the worlds currencies were no longer pegged to the dollar and were allowed to float free. The results were brutal. While pinky rings don't mean anything to you, my father was actually was one of their pioneers of their revival during the late '60s and early '70s. When gold prices started to skyrocket, they died. Not that this is important, but it did fix the events in my mind. The recent equivalent is the recent demand of the US for China to cut their yuan loose from the dollar. They will, eventually. It is in their best interest. The fact that we are demanding it means we are in the process of a reality adjustment. That adjustment isn't going to be nice. Trust me, I've been down this road before. It ain't pretty. The ruts are the worst. They strip you of your idealism.