Yes, they’re an export-driven economy and they’ve got their own equity bubble based on those exports and government stimulus to keep exporting. Their stock bubble will eventually go pop anyway but if their exports drop meaningfully it means mass unemployment and serious threat to the regime. Neither side have the courage to do what they need to do, cut consumption and increase exports (America) or vice-versa (China, Japan, Germany, Asian Tigers) so it’s full steam ahead towards a really big meltdown.
And if the article I found at newscientist is true, oil is a lot more common than previously thought, and not organic… and a lot easier to find. In places outside the Middle East.
This is even testable, if the guy’s claims are right, he’s claiming he’ll have a 70% chance of drilling a oil producing hole rather than the industry standard 20%.
Soooo… to quote the old song, “We’ll all go together when we go…”
That’s not even remotely true. That you can think that suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of the basics of economics.
There are benefits to having your currency be the major international currency of exchange in certain markets, and to be being the major reserve currency, but they’re not nearly as large as you imply, nor do they mean that everything that is purchased with your currency magically stays the same price with respect to your currency.
Submitted for your consideration:
Wall Street Journal editorial, “The Dollar Adrift: A Global Vote of Non-Confidence”
Sigh.
This is the Wall Street Journal opinion page. The news pages are great, but the opinion pages? The opinion pages are like a cancer, except that cancer sometimes goes into remission.
They cite David Malpass on this, former chief economist of Bear Stearns. Yes, that Bear Stearns. The very same guy who argued on those very same pages: “Don’t Panic About the Credit Market”. This was in 2007. Bear Stearns was sold off to JPMorgan for $10 a share in 2008 when it had been trading above $150 a year before. But do they keep him off the opinion page? Does that lack of foresight bother them? Of course not. They’ll print whatever they want to undercut their ideological enemies. Today it’s about capital flows. Tomorrow it’ll be something else. Whatever makes their case in the here and now, regardless of its underlying truth and regardless of whatever they previously said on the topic.
Capital is important? Okay. Then why didn’t they mention all that capital sitting around as [[id]=EXCRESNS&s[1][range]=10yrs"]excess bank reserves](Federal Reserve Economic Data | FRED | St. Louis Fed[1)? Neither do they mention the continued stability of US borrowing even after having issued countless hundreds of billions of new debt. And Malpass, in the previous day’s article, argues that China did well with a “stable currency”, completely ignoring that China spent long years deliberately undervaluing their currency to encourage exports. The RMB is still undervalued compared to many other countries according to PPP. And yet now that the US currency is weakening, which would have a similar stimulative effect on US exports, he completely disregards that to concentrate on capital flows instead, at a time when we’re soaked with savings because there’s so little private investment.
It’s absurd, beginning to end. A dollar collapse would do us no good, and the Fed will eventually have to suck out all those extra dollars it pumped into the system. But the time is not when the US economy still has 10% unemployment and an output gap measured in trillions of dollars. We can’t reverse course on expansionary monetary policy when the economy hasn’t even completely turned around yet. That makes no sense at all. When any of the inflationary indicators start creeping back up, we’ll know about it. CPI, long-term government bonds, whatever.
Until that happens, this is just more worthless hackery from a bunch of worthless hacks–in the case of Malpass, one of the guys actually directly involved with (if not responsible for) the crisis in the first place. These are not at all the people we should be going to for advice on the economy right now. Or ever.
From my layman’s perspective, I’m not sure what you’re getting at with this. Are you suggesting that’s some kind of strategic reserve for the economy? But that’s potential lending*, not investment, and created out of thin air as a direct product of Fed machinations.
*[ETA: not a trivial distinction in an environment of massive and protracted deleveraging]
Further, it seems to me that the Fed is pumping out a bunch of money via open market operations but then the banks are just sitting on the cash instead of lending it out: not a good sign for how domestic, dollar-based institutions view the US economy, much less foreign institutions that also have to worry about currency risk on top of that.
To me, that seems like pointing at a structurally unsound dam and saying “well, it’s still standing now, isn’t it?” I think it’s becoming clear that as much as we might like to criticize China for keeping its currency artificially low, we’re just as culpable for keeping our own borrowing costs artificially low by taking advantage of the dollar’s status as a reserve currency. What happens when that artificial prop is removed? Dams don’t fall down in a gradual motion.
No argument there: clearly the Fed is having to do making the least bad choice of several very bad choices.
It doesn’t matter that it was created out of thin air. Those dollars are as green as any other, and inflation is not a problem right now. The CPI actually went down a bit late last year, and it’s still well below the Fed target.
So yeah, it is a pool of “potential” lending, a pool that isn’t being used right now for private investment. So the WSJ hacks are worrying about new capital inflows… why exactly? We have capital. The supply is extensive compared to the demand. The dollar weakened a bit, and we had even more Far East countries throw even more money at us. What we don’t have yet, at present, is extensive private investment opportunities. So what the WSJ apparently wants, for reasons I can’t quite fathom, is for more countries to buy up dollars, to jack up the exchange rate to levels unfavorable for our exports, to jack up the trade deficit that’s only now starting to move toward balance, to jack up the interest rate during 10% unemployment, and all this to prevent… well, I don’t know exactly what. Higher premiums on our debt, when the auctions are still running smoothly (keeping in mind that high premiums can themselves drive up the value of the dollar)? Runaway inflation? The boogeyman?
Then why are they still lending to us in the form of the US government?
If you want to put it in supply and demand terms, the demand for US debt is robust whereas the demand for private assets is not so robust. So, for present, the US government should be creating more debt to supply that which is demanded. This is just a roundabout way of saying that now is the time for budget deficits, when holding deficits are cheap. Later will be the time to balance the budget.
Well, why is it a “dam”? Why is the dam so unsound? Where’s the evidence?
We’re at a debt-to-GDP ratio of maybe 60% right now. We’ve supported in the past a debt-to-GDP ratio of over 120%. Not that I want to use Japan as a model of fiscal responsibility, but they’re at over 150% without their dam bursting (at least, not yet–if we were at their level, with their demographic situation, I would absolutely be concerned). So where do you get this idea that the whole thing is structurally unsound? Now, of course, our long-run budget projections are bleak. They aren’t sustainable. But I’m looking at fiscal and monetary policy for 2009 and 2010 and maybe 2011. We will, absolutely, have to change course on this in a year or two. But I’m looking at the current weakening of the dollar as a natural balancing act to get world markets into equilibrium. This isn’t “a vote of no confidence”. The dollar became so strong because faith in everything else collapsed. The weakening dollar, seen in this way, is a sign of renewed confidence around the world. It’s not a sign of decreased confidence in the US, but of things slowly returning to normal.
This last point comes from Krugman, who has been pounding on this issue repeatedly, including today’s column. And this is the guy who is quite possibly the world’s premier expert on currency crises. He was a core developer of the field. He believes the weakening dollar is a good sign, and that now is not the time to get panicky for no good reason.
As he says, the US government reversed course in 1936-37, and the Great Depression had a relapse. The budget fearmongers won the day, with disastrous results. With unemployment still rising, we have every reason to believe it’s too early to move, and will continue to be too early to move for quite some time, and this is using the interest rate “rule” of a conservative economist. So what is the source of their concern? Where is the evidence that the dam is under strain? I’ve never seen anything substantive, only dark prognostications roughly whispered, as if viewed hazily through a gaudy crystal ball.
I don’t see evidence of weakness, only rampant and baseless speculation from exactly the same people who always get everything wrong. At this point, I’m nearly tempted to state that a person could form a reasonable set of opinions about the state of the economy as a whole by reading the WSJ editorials and coming to the exact opposite conclusion of their every assertion.
This is a balancing act, and yes, it’s possible to time the shift incorrectly. But the suggestion seems to be that we change the weights when almost every bit of the economic pressure is still on the wrong side of the scale, and that’s just not the way to go about this business.
That is one of the most insanely idiotic articles I have ever read. I’m guessing that Science Daily is basically equivalent to the National Equirer.
Uhmmm… no. No, it’s actually fairly reputable, though the contents are generally speculative.
The paper itself may not pan out, but this is honest science by honest scientists.
This guy is working at one of the top twenty science universities in the world, and he’s published this paper in a fairly reputable journal. See the cite at the bottom? Peer reviewed and all.
Why do you call it insanely idiotic?
Already in school when they told me that oil is fossil I had a hard time believing it. No way that all this oil is a result of a couple of dinosaurs… That is what is insane.
Hydrocarbons primarily come from algae, plankton, and plants not dinosaurs.
That still makes a lot of oil for a couple of plants…
This, for example, is a particularly stupid part of the article.
The hydrocarbons didn’t seep thousands of feet below the surface. Is this guy a young earth scientist or something? I’m no geologist, but we are talking about minute accumulations of sediment at a very slow rate over tens and hundreds of millions of years. This guy can’t figure out that the oil didn’t have to seep down thousands of feet? Thousands of feet of sediment have accumulated on top of the hydrocarbons.
I must be missing your sarcasm. Do you realize the amount of time that we’re talking about here? Let’s say .1 mm of plant material accumulated over the course of an entire year. You would probably consider that a reasonable, correct? Over 10 million years that would be a kilometer of material. Hydrocarbons were forming hundreds of millions of years ago. You don’t think that was enough time for it to accumulate to what we have now?
Based on the article linked in the OP, what OPEC is thinking of replacing the dollar with is gold.
There are a lot of American RWs, “gold bugs,” who decry the “fiat money” of Federal Reserve notes and want everything back on a precious-metals standard, which is supposedly more sound and stable, somehow. Shouldn’t they welcome this development?
I don’t see how .1 mm of “plant material” accumulates. Plants, grow, die, get eaten, burnt, there is whole biological life cycle. Plants don’t just “accumulate”.
As I said, it’s a reputable site. That said, it reports on academic papers, and the papers may be of varying quality. It does go for interesting ones, and largely republishes and edits press releases. That may or may not pan out.
So it’s reporting accurately, but the content it is reporting on may be incorrect. But, again, this guy is at a very, very good institution.
The short answer is that, yes, stuff does just accumulate. You are probably too ignorant of the subject matter to even begin questioning it.
So tell me. Fight the ignorant sigh
Why don’t you read this wikipedia entry and some of the sublinks in it and get back.