« Watching Al Jazeera English TV, streaming live on the Web | Main | Thanksgiving recipes plus tips for beginners »

November 16, 2006

Trade deficit and the $; Siberian bears still awake; When Dylan played Plymouth; Congress to tackle phone spam?

Opinion: The pain of a weak US dollar: Tough talk in Asia Times from Axel Merk, "the portfolio manager of the Merk Hard Currency Fund, a no-load mutual fund that invests in a basket of hard currencies from countries with strong monetary policies assembled to protect against the depreciation of the US dollar relative to other currencies."

Given that context, here's some of what he says. If you have a perspective on this, please add it in comments. I'm out of my expertise here, but this seems like something the voters very much want Congress to address.

The United States' massive trade deficit exerts pressure on the US dollar as currency is shoveled abroad in return for goods and services. As the US economy is slowing down and possibly sliding into recession, the rate at which the trade deficit grows may also be slowing; in September, this deficit was "only" US$64.3 billion - still near record territory but not as bad as economists had predicted.

Does this mean the worst for the dollar is over? After all, it now costs over 50% more to pay for a 100 euro hotel room than six years ago, assuming the hotel has not raised its price. Can it get worse? Since you probably cannot afford to go to Europe on vacation anymore, it may not matter to you. But even if you do not travel abroad, it does matter to you as your purchasing power erodes; among others, the cost of imports and commodities, including the price you pay at the gasoline pump, is likely to go up.

The trade deficit is a component of the broader current-account deficit, which also includes investment income. The current-account deficit is the shortfall that needs to be covered by foreign investors for the dollar not to fall. Last year, foreigners needed to purchase $805 billion in dollar-denominated assets just to keep the dollar from falling. That's more than $2 billion every single day.

...The main reason the dollar has not fallen faster and more sharply is that it is in no one's interest for the dollar to fall. The most prominent recent example of the pain a weak dollar can cause is with Airbus, the European aircraft maker. It is an "old-economy" company with bureaucratic structures seemingly incapable of adjusting to a more rapidly changing world.

...As consumers cannot afford to spend as much as in the past, their savings rate is bound to go up as well; but there is a difference between savings going up because consumers cannot afford to spend anymore and an environment that fosters savings and investments. Given that most politicians are interested in short-term growth no matter which party they belong to, it remains to be seen whether the new US Congress will pave the way for a change. Remember that we do not have an "ownership" society when all we own is debt.

Can't sleep? Warm weather wrecks bears' winter slumber: Reuters reports,

Insomniac bears are roaming the forests of southwestern Siberia, scaring local people, as the weather stays too warm for the animals to fall into their usual winter slumber...

Russian media reported that in the Kemerovo region and other areas, normally cold and snowy by now, there are fresh buds on trees and some flowers have blossomed for the second time this year.

This is ominous, but it's awfully nice that the temperatures are still in the 60s in mid-November in New England, and we haven't had a hard frost in my yard yet. The birds are still around, and winter, when it comes, will already be shorter.

And the heat hasn't come on much at all.

To see the rest of the bear, click on the photo. It comes from a Kemerovo site with photos we think are of the region -- hard to tell, don't speak Russian.

Good news for the phone-spammed: Dems to put Congress to work. Chicago Sun-Times:

With their new power, Democratic leaders want to craft a constitutional way to stop voters from being flooded with robo-calls peddling deceptive information. They are floating the notion that authorizing calls with fraudulent content should be a crime. "These robo-calls, somehow, constitutionally, we are going to have to find some way to stop this," Reid said.

Schumer said he and Rep. Rahm Emanuel -- the boss of the House Democratic campaign committee, who is expected to be elected to a leadership spot today -- made a list of what they consider abusive campaign practices. In some cases, the volume of calls that went out to targeted likely Democratic voters was so heavy as to constitute harassment.

In other examples, the calls peddled disinformation -- whether about a candidate or the location of a polling place. Criticizing the robo-call dirty tricks, Schumer was blunt. "It's despicable" and the perps "should go to jail for 10 years."

Schumer said he and Emanuel are looking at legislation applying criminal penalties to certain kinds of campaigning and creation of a separate unit at the Justice Department to prosecute.

Yes!

Blog bounce: Lane Lambert of The (Quincy, Mass.) Patriot Ledger emailed me earlier in the week asking if I knew anything about the provenance of the Bob Dylan 1975 Rolling Thunder mp3s, recorded in Plymouth, Mass., at BigO Singapore that I'd blogged Saturday.

His editor found my link through a Google alert, and Lane was interested, since he had been to a Rolling Thunder concert elsewhere. He took the thread and ran with it.

TANGLED UP IN PLYMOUTH - Still freewheelin’: Dylan masterpiece resurfaces finds somebody who went (tickets were $7.50). Amazingly,

The shows still stand as the most significant musical event in the town’s history. They also marked a notable moment in rock history as well: Dylan launched his famous Rolling Thunder Revue tour from there.

Kudos to Lane for finding a local story in an obscure bit of the Web flung up by a blogger. It's supposed to work this way.

Free at last: Conservative/Libertarian columnist John Tierney is leaving the elite Times Select crowd, but unless you subscribe, you wouldn't know it.
Bring On the Seinfeld Congress:

Whatever they (Congress) do the next two years, I won’t be here to kick them around. This is my last column on the Op-Ed page. I’ve enjoyed the past couple of years in Washington, but one election cycle is enough. I’m returning full time to the subject and the city closest to my heart: science and New York. I’ll be writing a column and a blog for the Science Times section.

I hate to abandon my libertarian comrades here fighting in the belly of the beast, but this is the right moment to leave. After six years of libertarians reluctantly electing Republicans as the lesser of two evils, we’ve finally had enough. We’ve voted out big-government conservatism, and the result is the happy state of gridlock. For now, our work is done. See you in January in a new column on a new page.

Head spinners: Here's pointage to two of the most unusual blogs around, for those nights when the rational brain cells are used up and parched, and a shot of strangeness feels right.

Rigorous Intuition is the larger site for Canadian Jeff Wells' alt-reality blog. Its subhed is, "What You Don't Know Can't Hurt Them," and They are the nefarious dudes who run the world. Did fellow Bonesman Kerry deliberately raise a distraction for Bush before the election? This and more there.

Tom Matrullo's IMproPRieTies: "A new commonplaces, fair and balanced watchdog of the zou gou" is a horse of a different color.

Um, try this:

A stylus - child picks it up, discovers it can represent what until then has been mute, offstage. Soon the impedimenta of everyday life are all around it: mother, tree, rock, puppet, graduate student french exam, history of bees, Bush's cabinet, my catty friend, the introduction to Oblomov, clouds, viable alternatives to global warming, the question of Palestine, the entelechy of irony, a most lively comic talent, what I saw on Youtube, the reason we beat the Persians, 40 centimes, Blessed Event, pissing from Mexican balconies, Clem, giant windmills, teeth set in the skull, spiders, Berubeanism, cojones, my USian friend, the bowling ball...

sizzle

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 9:17 AM | Permalink