back..

Rob Schaap rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au
Wed Aug 1 17:50:44 PDT 2001


G'day all,


>Yep, Australian Chardonnay is some of the best in the world.

Ya gotta be careful with that grape around here. One of the nastiest slurs in Australian discourse is 'chardonnay socialist' (Canberra, Sydney and Adelaide are famous for 'em). So best to opt for the lager, which is better than yancqui catpiss, anyway.


>A bit
>unseeming to appear to gloat over the swaggeringly overpriced, overbearing,
>almighty US dollar, though

Cruelly insensitive. Glow ye in thy shame, Douglas! Thou Pizarro.

We actually have to live on those prettily-hued little kopeks y'know ...


>:-D You might have made the last call, however -
>talk about talking (or forcing) it down has begun to emerge as of late
>(today's Investor's Daily, today's Paul Krugman @ NYT)

Y'mean the bit where PK speaks thusly:

" ... there is a clear analogy between the

soaring dollar and the recent tech bubble. As Robert Shiller pointed

out in his book "Irrational Exuberance," a gradually rising asset

price acts like a natural Ponzi scheme, in which each new wave of

investors creates capital gains for the previous wave. If this goes on

long enough, it can silence the doubters.

But eventually the process ends -- and you know that the end is nigh

when white-haired executives reject old-fashioned accounting. That

means that the mania has spread to the suits, and that the Ponzi

scheme is about to run out of suckers.

The dollar has been rising against the currencies of other industrial

countries since the middle of the 1990's. This sustained rise has made

dollar bears look foolish, but it has also priced U.S. products out of

world markets. Since 1995 the U.S. current account deficit, the

difference between what we buy from foreigners and what we sell to

them, has quadrupled to an astonishing $450 billion. It goes without

saying that this is the biggest such deficit in world history. More

startling is the fact that at 4.5 percent of G.D.P., the U.S. current

account deficit is a bigger share of our economy than the deficits of

Indonesia or South Korea on the eve of the 1997 Asian financial

crisis ... "

Cheers, Rob.



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