[Sarah]

heads up for those interested!

[investigateworld]

ping

[DB]

In my opinion, there is substantial inflation going on even though it is claimed otherwise. I'm in the process of building a new home and common material costs have increased dramatically over the last few years. Steel has increased something like 60% in just the last year. Lumber has more than doubled in the last four years I believe. Virtually everything else has been the same trend.

[OwenKellogg]

ping

[timestax]

The business of America is Business.

[RadioAstronomer]

bttt for later read

[Iris7]

The article requires registration. As a matter of principle I cannot access it.

As far as the value of dollars versus European and East Asian currencies, there are a number of political and economic situations at work here. The Democrats hope to develop the "devaluation" issue into a wedge issue, for instance. For another, the flood of dollars going to the Peoples Republic of China is being used for, amongst other things, attempts to dominate future oil production. Certainly those dollars are used to purchase oil in quantities directly leading to SOME of the recent oil price increases. There are many other reasons as well.

Perhaps you are interested in hard currencies, as in the old gold standard. Under the gold standard dollar devaluation would have progressed much farther by now. Attempts to maintain local currency values for domestic political reasons in the face of the foreign exchange markets have lead to bad ends generally in recent decades.

One hopes that current incremental devaluation policies may forestall a sudden drop in dollar values. Extreme and sudden unemployment is much in the Democrat Party's interest so long as George W. Bush can be blamed.

[MozamFreepinBique]

I'm no economist, but I can tell you that those of us outside the US who have to buy local currency with dollars are being STRANGLED by the drop in value. I've calculated the increase in prices on everything we buy to be about 23% higher than six months ago. Ouch! Ow!