Ease up our search for alternative fuels.

Wow.

That's about as shortsighted as saying since the sun is shining I don't need to put the roof on yet.

And just what is making the dollar robust, which this lame article fails to explain. What would be necessary for a genuine robust dollar is America making things and exporting them, so that it would add actual value to that dollar. And even if there is a spike in services beings exported, it would need a long term maintenance of that level to actually boost the economy, and we just don't have enough of that to accomplish such a revival.

As for little that Congress can do to effect the trade deficit. Hmm. I wonder if you ever did study econ or poli sci. Policies not affect the deficit? I suppose you don't know what NAFTA is. And believe me, I vaguely recall my econ class with Prof. Taylor, but I've read enough to know that Congress can definitely affect the deficit, that there is no time to ease in our search for alternatuive energy sources....

What?! Search for?! I have to wonder what planet you live on. I can name five right now: wind, solar, geothermal, wave and tide. All of which we already have "found" and could be and are used, though not as extensively in the US because of the current sleeping arrangements between Big Oil and Congress.

This was one poorly written(I hope) article. I can hope that the author isn't as poorly informed as the article suggests.

Or making policy decisions.

As we speak, the buck is taking a slide. It just shows that at the speed of light, the relativistic distortions predicted by Einstein are valid.

Markets now travel at light speed, at light speed the static universe goes from beginning to end in a heartbeat.

"And just what is making the dollar robust, which this lame article fails to explain."

Foreign central banks cooperated with the "FED" and purchased dollars and held them off the market to drive up the price. This would be a VERY temporary "fix" at best.

-- Kent Shaw

Suffice to say...

Dale is more of a cheerleader than an economist... or even a pundit.

Convert those dollars to something while you can, Dale... tis a hard rain that's gonna fall.

It's the over-valued dollar that's permitting wholesale export of our jobs to places with under-valued currency like China and much of Southeast Asia. I think I'd rather see the dollar slide a bit further and bring a few jobs back to the U.S.A. than buy an overly-cheap Chinese TV.

-Warren

The dollar is in bearish territory. Extreme market volatility is part and parcel to bear markets. So this current rebound represents a signal to sell the dollar on ralleys.

In bull markets you buy strength on pullbacks to support and in bear markets you sell weakness on ralleys to resistance levels.

The real reason the dollar has seemingly had a ralley is that the Euro Union is experiencing its own economic downturn with Germany suffering a 3 percent pullback on its GDP. Germany along with France is the powerhouse that pulls the Euro Union markets with the other member nations simply as nothing but freight cars being pulled along. They also have a housing market debacle of their own to the tune of 250 billion Euro's of questionable to failing mortgages. Britain is in the same fix concerning mortgages, as is Australia and New Zealand.

Interestingly Canada did not get involved with such deadly speculative nonsense. Also Canada has had a treasury surplus for the past seven years and has been relentlessly paying down its public debt making it an attractive currency for bad times. They are also resource rich with the Chinese being major investors in that country.

So what we have here is misery seeking company. The world is moving into a longterm, "hard" recession/depression whatever you want to call it. This is actually good for the capital markets though because it reestablishes discipline in the markets and makes all fiat currencies more dear to borrowers. Inflation is deadly to all "faith based" currencies with only gold being a hard money safe haven.

Gold is pulling back due to the unwinding of long positions in the market by hedge funds along with many other commodities. Again, this is all good, but when folks no longer have jobs and can't pay their mortgages or retail credit debt, buy food or even borrow money it represents extreme hardship and recession.

There's no easy way out because this is only the beginning of a meltdown of the worlds banking system who's bottom line has been puffed by paper assets created out of thin air due to the G8 central bank pumping "funny money" into their respective economies to support rabid spending on the part of their consumer bases. Bubbles don't lasts forever. This is an example 17th century Dutch "tulipmania" gone bust.

I had to laugh the other night when I read the term "ninja" loans. These are the next class of American loans that are now crumbling bigtime; ie., "no income, no job, no asset" loans. Believe it or not unscrupulous lenders were loaning people money to purchase homes that had none of the above; ie., they were nothing but the worst class of "flippers" possible and in borderline neighborhoods on top of it. Once these homes are repossessed they will be stripped clean by "repo miners" of their fixtures, copper pipe, rugs and anything else that can be mined from the empty structures.

The international banking cabal has sown the wind, unfortunately alot of people that weren't directly involved with this debacle are going to reap the whirlwind with banking, brokerage and insurance firm failures "worldwide"...!

Carl Nemo **==

Carl,

Your post is one of the best short overall assessments of the current situation that I have seen.

On the almost humorous "ninja loan" topic: I suspected a problem when a well-employed friend bought a new 1/2 mil house here in AZ, and across the street a Mexican family (no English, jalopy in the drive, no furniture, ping-pong table in the always-open garage) moved in across the street. I just kept thinking "No way. How? No way. How?"

-W-

(I only mean 'no obvious means to support the purchase of the house', not ethnic prejudice.)