From The Independent

Expert View: The long, unwinding road to a dollar adjustment
By Bill Robinson
Published: 03 December 2006

The weakness of the dollar is making headlines again, reviving the old concerns about the sustainability of the US current account deficit and the size of the dollar adjustment needed to correct it.

Here are the facts: the US, the richest country in the world, consumes more each year than it produces. Its already high standard of living is being increased by net imports from abroad worth some 6.5 per cent of GDP. These imports (eg from China) are paid for in dollars, with which the Chinese monetary authorities obligingly buy US securities. So until recently US plc lived beyond its income by increasing its debt to the Chinese. Since then, Russia and other oil exporting countries in the Middle East have been buying US assets.

How long can this go on? One school of macroeconomists argues that sooner or later these countries will grow tired of supplying manufactured goods and oil in return for paper IOUs.

maybe a hedging option Gus .....

‘Have you heard of the Amero? It has been proposed as a new currency for Canada, the United States, and Mexico. Who made the proposal? Robert Pastor, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of "Toward A North American Community." The U.S. Congress would be replaced – not by nothing, unfortunately!!! – but by something even worse: a "North American Parliamentary Group." And who would control the "volume of money" in this union? The creators and issuers of the Amero. It would enter the ring to do battle with the yuan and the euro. The winner would be "absolute master of all industry and commerce" in most of the industrialized world. The centralization of power would have taken a giant step toward totality.

Reginald McKenna, once Chancellor of the Exchequer of England, also sheds some light: "Those who create and issue money and credit direct the policies of government and hold in the hollow of their hands the destiny of the people." The real rulers work behind the scenes. You can’t vote for them; you don’t even know their names. That’s bad enough when they are local, and at least theoretically influenced by local opinion. It’s worse when they are national; it’s truly horrific when they are international, distant, remote, and totally unaware of your existence, much less concerned about it. The proposed Amero is a step in that direction. Does anybody care? How about those buffoons in Washington who are, theoretically, there to protect our rights? Are they more readily influenced by you and me, or by the creators of "money?" A rhetorical question!’

The Abnormality of Unity

‘"Iraq got the foreign investment rules long sought by U.S. corporations," says Antonia Juhasz, a visiting scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington.

Juhasz said the new laws, which were a part of the 100 'Bremer Orders' instituted by former U.S. administrator Paul Bremer when he headed the Coalition Provisional Authority during the first year of the occupation, provided a flood of benefits for U.S. companies. 

These included "100 percent repatriation of profits earned in Iraq by foreign companies; 100 percent foreign ownership of Iraqi businesses, including banks; privatisation of Iraq's state owned enterprises; 100 percent immunity for U.S. contractors and soldiers from Iraq's laws; and 'national treatment' which allowed for Iraqis to be all but excluded from the reconstruction for years while the U.S. government paid 50 billion dollars to some 150 U.S. corporations for work in Iraq."’

Business Is The Next Big Casualty In Iraq