HowardDollar to Gold to Something Else?
Some Gold Backing for the Dollar?
The question is not really one of gold backing of the dollar. Even when a currency is 100-percent gold backed, it is known that under certain types of political conditions, like war, it will never be "paid out" in gold anyway. Monetary systems are political. And so are financial bubbles.
People get told the same cover stories and insanities time after time. In 1979, we were told by Paul Volcker of the Fed Reserve, that to "stop inflation", interest rates had to be driven up to 20-percent or more. Did this have any relation to Mr. Volcker speech months earlier, that he believed in a "Controlled Disintegration of the World Economy"? See a similarly titled book done for the Council on Foreign Relations by one Fred Hirsch.
So, the real estate bubble was built up first in 1992, and then in a much more intense way after 2001, and the fall of the Y2K-Internet bubble.
Now the poor old Wall St. urinal is worried about the new US Congress not being so free trade oriented. The poor babies worry in the Nov 18th issue, WSJ that: there ae 11 free trade agreements awaiting Congressional action. Fast track authority expires in June 2007. Bush is unlikely to revive the Doha Round of international trade talks. Some Democrats are talking about tax legislation to discourage outsourcing. Horrors, they don't like the joys of slave labor!
Of course, the irony is that any type of significant resistance to the outsourcing run by the likes of Lehman Brothers, and Wilbur Ross, that the opposition itself will be the thing to kill the bubble and trigger the crash.
However, a dollar crash can be stopped by government action, like Franklin Roosevelt's 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, and a bankruptcy reorganization. You will have to essentially write off, or freeze the entire hedge fund, offshore financial operation. That could be fun.
