Oil nearly $100/barrel right now ($98)

China this morning says they might diversify their dollar investments and holdings

Stock Market down about 250 points right now

Dollar in seeming free fall:

$2.11 to Pound
1.47 to euro
Can Loony worth 91.2 cents - post WWII alltime low

though in last few minutes pound is 2.1046 and euro $1.46.7

there could be further erosion in a chaotic day!

Can Loony worth 91.2 cents - post WWII alltime low"

do you mean
one Looney cost 1.10 US dollars, so US dollar is worth 91.2 Canadian?

i got it wrong maybe 91.6 cents US = 1 Looney

1 looney = 91.6 cents U.S.

Maybe it's time to buy that homeowner's insurance, PalenQ, because surely the sky is falling!

1.10 US will buy you one Canadian dollar ( looney)
91.2 cents Canadian will buy one
US dollar

don' worry,
when I was teaching economics ,
the students always had a hard time figuring out the sale and purchase of currencies.

PalenQ, Get your facts right:

One "loony" is now worth 1.07625 US Dollar.

One US $ is now worth 0.92915 Canadian dollars.

Very complex problem that took decades to get into. I gave up trying to explain it to people years ago. Guess Americans just have to get back to producing things. Even as with a family, a country can only just consume for so long. Eventually you have to get back to work.

Even the Australian dollar is coming up to par with the US dollar.

If the New Zealand dollar ever reaches par, then it will really be time to start worrying.

www.xe.com

"Americans just have to get back to producing things"

The British economy is more de-industrialised than America's. Our merchandise balance of payments deficit, as a proportion of GDP, is more or less the same as America's.

Yet the pound's going through the roof

Making things the Chinese can make better faster and cheaper does nothing for anyone, except ensure the poor can't afford to buy anything . Above all, it doesn't stop your currency from devaluing.

ok flann. I also said I have given up trying to explain it all.

Each Fed reduction in interest rates in the US helps the dollar slide just a little more...

Behind closed doors. The USA owes trillions of dollars to many foreign investors. In recent months this debt has been reduced by perhaps 40% by progressively de-valuing the dollar. USA citizens suffer little except at the gas pump because those same foreign investors are raising oil prices to cover the devaluation of the dollar!

Sorry, but I think US citizens "suffer" quite a bit if they are traveling to the UK.

<Sorry, but I think US citizens "suffer" quite a bit if they are traveling to the UK.>

not only that but the pound is also very high so we suffer that as well

Never forget that most Americans never set foot out of the country and they consume a considerable number of American products, not subject to 'direct' exchange fluctuations.

Jack - Americans import a lot of products, including oil so there is a huge worry about inflationary aspect of sinking dollar and oil rising

French wine, etc.

i'd say we import more than any other nation, especially from China

But Americans eat American grown food for the most part, consume American cultural products, etc. etc. Obviously, their Chinese cheap clothes and products influenced by the rise in oil prices will slowly go up in price, but we are far from an American crisis in that respect. Look at how little effect gasoline prices have had on American habits so far.

>TravMimi
You're right. Explaining won't help, because people won't listen or even try to understand. Game over, it's everybody for him/herself during the next years. . You can't even blame the speculators for doing what they do, it's so easy for them. I do just hope the $ doesn't just vanish into thin air.

logos - It's sad but true. People didn't listen for decades. Even with the obvious results they still don't believe it. If it wasn't so sad I would have enjoyed saying "told ya so"

"i'd say we import more than any other nation, especially from China"

So what? Your economy is bigger than anyone else's

What you don't do is import more per head of the population, or as a percentage of GDP. Britain imports far more per head than America(practically all our food comes from continental Europe, for example).

We obviously don't import as much, relatively, from China - because there are lots of cheaper-wage economies a great deal nearer (Bangladesh, for example, whose major products we import duty free, but the US - to its everlasting shame, and if my country behaved as abominably, I'd burn my passport- slaps duties of up to 26% onto the products of one of the world's poorest countries).

But even there: in the first half of 2007, China accounted for 29% of Europe's clothing imports, but - because of America's uniquely protectionist rules (seriously, uniquely: not even South Africa, not even Turkey puts up such barriers against foreign competition as the Land of the Unfree) only 23% of America's clothing imports.

Yet - in spite of our prtactising that most unAmerican of principlpes, free trade - Britain and the Eurozone have currencies going through the roof, while the world's almost greatest protectionist (no-one can match India at this game) watches its money collapse.

It's not the few foreign clothes you grudgingly allow in: it's your inability to provide goods and services the world wants that's dragging your currency into the mire. Last year alone, for example, New York was massively overtaken by London as the city where the world's businesses raise capital.