De Dollar Hegemonie 17

De Boston Globe:

'Our Economic Quagmire by Robert Kuttner.

Even if you are not planning an (ever more expensive) European trip
any time soon, pay attention to the decline of the dollar. It could
portend deeper trouble for the economy.

The dollar just hit a 20-month low against the euro. It now costs
$1.32 to buy one euro, and the dollar is falling against other
currencies as well.

The greenback is sinking mainly because the United States runs an
immense trade deficit with the rest of the world, especially East
Asia. Countries like China, Korea, and Japan have an unhealthy co
dependency with the United States. Their governments help their
industries capture leadership in technologies, products, and jobs.
They then sell America far more then they buy. However their central
banks happily lend those dollars back to us, so that we can finance
the trade deficit and keep buying their exports.

We now owe foreigners more than $1 trillion , about half of it to
central banks. Our annual trade deficit is over 7 percent of one
year's Gross Domestic Product, and it keeps growing.

If any other country ran such a deficit, foreigners would lose
confidence and its currency would crash. That's what happened to
Mexico, Argentina, even to Britain in the early 1990s. The United
States has avoided that fate thus far, because Asian central banks
keep the dollar propped up, and that reassures private investors.

But this game can go on only so long. This past week's decline of the
dollar against the euro is rather like the seismic tremors that
precede a major earthquake on a fault line. We don't know whether
this is the big one. We just know that the big one is coming sooner
or later.

No less than former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker put the
odds of a dollar crash at 75 percent within five years. He said that
more than two years ago.

The dollar fault line keeps widening because of our tricky relations
with China. Beijing deliberately keeps its currency undervalued as
part of its export strategy, to make its products even cheaper in the
United States and to make US exports more expensive in Chinese markets.'

Lees verder:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/
oped/articles/2006/12/02/our_economic_quagmire/