Dollar Diplomacy

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Jul 19 16:23:47 PDT 1999


Max Sawicky wrote:


>Does "fundamentally the price" mean that the currency
>price converges to the fundamental as some kind of
>(shudder) . . . equilibrium?

When has it ever looked like equilibrium? Market prices gyrate around the fundamental value, but never stay there for long.


> And if not for currency,
>why not for everything else? Is the short run on that
>account a tertiary consideration? Does the disparity
>between short- and long-run have no fundamental
>significance for the economic trends?

Sure it does. I'm not a Shaikhian value-fundamentalist, who thinks causality only goes one way, real-->financial. In shorthand, I'll accept the real as the determinant in the last instance (yeah, that old dodge), but there's a lot of feedback, from financial to real, from short-term to long. For example, the mighty dollar of the early 1980s had a major and lasting effect on U.S. manufacturing.

Don't ask me to quantify it all though.

Doug



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