| Friday, September 21, 2007 |
08:05 - He's a magic man
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2007/september#thu-20-canadian
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Gruber:
Canadian Dollar Reaches Parity With Staggering U.S. Greenback •
The dollar also hit an all-time low against the Euro. Heck of a job, Bushie.
Yeah, who knew all those Presidential edicts he's been issuing lately—the Make the U.S. Dollar More Worthless Act, the Increase Unemployment Act of 2005, the Consumer Confidence Reduction Act, the Presidential Depress American Industry Program—would turn out like this? Surely if Kerry had won, he'd have come up with different proposals, like the Strengthen the Economy Act (so cruelly vetoed last year, as we all recall, after overwhelmingly passing both houses).
Or, possibly, as the article states (whose headline, by the way, now seems to be "Canadian dollar opens at parity with U.S. dollar, but pulls back"):
The loonie's rapid appreciation - up from 95 cents at the start of this month and from under 90 cents last spring - has added to the woes of the manufacturing sector concentrated in Central Canada.
The currency's gains since it bottomed out below 62 cents in January 2002 have been fuelled by rising global prices for commodities - notably oil, which has been hitting record highs and currently is at about US$81.50, and gold, which hit a new 28-year high Friday in Europe at US$739 an ounce.
More broadly, sentiment toward the American dollar has been souring as the impact of the crumbling U.S. housing market widens.
In other words, America is not Apple, the strength of the dollar is not the stock price, and Bush is not Steve Jobs. (Though how would you like to have a control freak like Jobs as President, in any event? That's how gulags get built.)
I still remember when, years ago, an old college friend came to town for the weekend, and I went down to Pacific Grove to meet up with him. We went into an ice cream shop. He struck up a conversation with the kid behind the counter; by way of discussing how business was, my friend said, "I guess people haven't had a lot of money to spend on things like ice cream lately." He leaned in conspiratorially. "...Because, y'know. Bush." The kid immediately replied: "Oh, don't get me started."
It's only a crazy person who would want to be President, and get blamed for everything short of the sky falling. Or even that, in this day and age.
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Brian Tiemann
