Good morning. Today, thoughts on the panic over the dollar, how to pick jurors for a Wall Street trial and Capitalism… An Apathy Story:
Despite what the New York Post says, the dollar has not lost its reserve status (Seeking Alpha)
The dollar is certainly going through a tumultuous time, and it will continue to deteriorate over the next several years. Eventually it may completely collapse and have to be replaced by a new currency. But the dollar has not, I repeat, has not, been replaced as the reserve currency, at least in my view.
What the New York Post said (New York Post):
After printing up trillions of new dollars and new bonds to stimulate the US economy, the Federal Reserve chief is now boxed into a corner battling two separate monsters that could devour the economy — ravenous inflation on one hand, and a perilous recession on the other.
“He’s in a crisis worse than the meltdown ever was,” said Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital. “I fear that he could be the Fed chairman who brought down the whole thing.”
Oh, stop panicking about inflation (Financial Times):
Higher prices of gold reflect fear, not fact. This fear is not widely shared. The US government can borrow at 4.2 per cent over 30 years and 3.4 per cent over 10 years. During the crisis, the inflation expectations implied by the gap in yields between conventional and inflation-protected securities collapsed. These have since recovered – yet another sign of policy success. But they are still below where they were before the crisis. The immediate danger, given excess capacity, in the US and the world, is deflation, not inflation.
Capitalism: An Apathy Story (Oped News) Ouch:
When Goldman Sachs wins the Nobel Prize in Economics next year, we will become mildly annoyed and then yawn in the best American tradition and go on allowing the Robber Class to steal us blind, hoping that there is another juicy divorce or celebrity death that can distract us from reality.
The Robber Class doesn’t frustrate me nearly as much as the Robbed Class. Robbers will be Robbers only as long as we in the Robbed Class let them.
GDP is a misleading indicator (The Atlantic)
How to pick jurors for a Wall Street trial (Marketplace)
Computers will only be faster for 75 more years (Inside Science):
A pair of physicists has shown that computers have a speed limit as unbreakable as the speed of light. If processors continue to accelerate as they have in the past, we’ll hit the wall of faster processing in less than a century.
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