A few quick thoughts.
1) Nairobi very much reminds me of Shanghai. It's a teeming mass of people, has a very "developing country" look to it, has a permahaze (though nowhere nearly as bad), and most of all, the smells are similar - occasional wafts of both good and bad food, wood fires, plastic fires, and exhaust / pollution. It's also a similar sociological experience - we are walking billboards that shout "We are not from here!" in blinking, Vegas-style lights.
B) As someone who is paid in USD and currently buying things around the globe, I would like to go on the record and thank all of our assorted political "leaders" from the past several decades for their brilliant, prescient fiscal, trade, and monetary policies.
The Number of Euros Purchased With $1
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III) If you're not familiar with the term "Shanghaied", it was fairly common practice in the port cities of the mid-19th century Western US for men to go into a bar and wake up on a merchant ship in the Pacific Ocean, on their way to the Orient.
Due to a confluence of factors (laws that required a man to finish a voyage once it began, a shortage of labor, incentives for third parties to find crew members), shady saloon owners would frequently drug their patrons, drop them through a trap door that led to an elaborate series of underground tunnels, forge the hiring papers, and dump them on a merchant ship.
That's sort of like recent US history - we got drunk on free money, fell through the trap door of a rigged financial system, and next thing we know, the Chinese own our asses.
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1 comments:
CK, since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, the US dollar has lost 98% of its purchasing power. Most people don't know that the US dollar was a stable currency in the preceding 130 years, when it was backed by gold and silver.
Milton Friedman said it the best - "Inflation is a hidden tax on the people." Most people think that inflation is prices of goods and services going up. It is actually the decline in the purchasing power of the monetary unit. It benefits borrowers and punishes savers. Since the US government is the world's most prodigious borrower and cannot ever repay its debt in constant dollars, it must debase the currency, in the hopes of repaying debts with worthless currency.
Inflation is the largest government confiscation of wealth ever engineered in human history. And the US Constitution does not allow the creation of a new branch of government with the power to create money out or thin air (the Federal Reserve). This is what our children should be learning in our schools if the Republic is to survive as the Founding Fathers envisioned it.
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