I had a string of wholly disturbing and unpatriotic thoughts the other day, of which I thought "I should not publish this"... But given the low readership of this page, I figured what the hell.
All of us have felt the impacts of the current recession in one form or another. Armchair economists may have some reason to raise a couple of eyebrows. The first is a small but continuing stream of reports on oil producing nations switching trade to the Euro. Conspiracy theorists may say this is the reason for the invasion of Iraq, and the funding of the anti-Chavez movements in Venezuela. Personally, I don't wholesale buy it. But what does pique my interest is the steady stream of reports on the wavering rate decline between the dollar and Euro... There are a number of reasons for this- but Europe remains by and large a larger and more educated market (though with many more trade restrictions, and lots of artificial boundaries).
Even more disturbing, particularly for people in my industry is the unprecedented amount of white collar and technical foreign outsourcing- not just in software, but also accounting, labs, stock trading, tech support... To make matters worse, America has traditionally relied on "brain drain" immigration to fuel intellectual property development. Thanks to the Shrub, America has become a decidedly less immigrant friendly place than it was a couple of years ago. Also, thanks to a short sighted industry, we are assaulted by a barrage of anti-research laws, such as the DMCA, SSSCA, etc.
While no doubt, the United States will continue to be the lead of IP generation if nothing else because of having the best educational and lab infrastructure in the world, for a long time to come... The thought still lingers- why does the rest of the world have to play solely by America's game with the [albeit painful and haphazard] unionization of Europe, and the advent of many to many global communications?
What is driving the American economy right now? Where is the push coming from? it's not coming from investors and certainly not from the government.
So then the evil thoughts came to me... It would be very easy to social engineer a meme on the internet amongst American citizens: invest in Euros, because it is a safe long term bet.
As much as the IMF and other global traders have fscked with everyone else's currency, the dollar remains the standard. Having Americans hoard someone else's currency- having a dollar panic within the United States itself- is unheard of. But what is stopping it at this point? If a dollar panic were to occur, it would be globally catastrophic, and *very* bad for American citizens.
I write this, however, because I wonder how long it may be until key Pacific Rim banks start increasing their Euro holdings- inducing a similar net effect from the outside...