Deficits, the Dollar, and IEDs

international | anti-capitalism | other press Sunday January 30, 2005 22:02 by Yoshie Furuhashi

Bill Gates, the world's richest man, is now betting against the dollar. "I'm short the dollar," says Gates. "The ol' dollar, it's gonna go down." Will the dollar be one day the target of attacks by hedge funds? Recently the dollar rallied a bit, but short-term fluctuations aside, the dollar has nowhere to go but down. Gradually or suddenly and precipitously? It may be possible to engineer gradual devaluation of the dollar and stimulate US export, shrinking the US trade deficit, but it turns out that "the US does not have adequate manufacturing capacity to eliminate the external deficit," according to David Hale. That means that the US power elite will demand that the US working class reduce consumption to haul the multinational ruling class out of the abyss of the US current-account deficit, at the same time as forcing the US working class to make greater and greater sacrifices as IED fodders, sinking further into the quagmire in Iraq. Can American workers fight back?

FULL TEXT:
http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/01/deficits-dollar-and-ieds.html