LOL!
Posted on 11/29/2006 6:29:22 AM PST by shrinkermd
No one, of course, wants to see the dollar in a free fall. And no question, it has retreated against some currencies. But worried? We aren’t.
The dollar isn’t weak at all. Indeed, it’s trading 19% above its level in the mid-1990s, smack in the middle of the Internet boom. True, it’s come off the highs it set in early 2002, when foreign investors still spooked after 9/11 were desperate to invest in a safe haven with sound markets, the rule of law, low interest rates and fast economic growth. That pushed the buck up sharply.
...The other is that, contrary to lots of current market reports, the U.S. currency isn’t “nearing new lows” at all. The reason is simple: Many people focus on very narrow measures of the dollar’s value — like the dollar-euro, or the dollar-yen, or even the dollar-yuan. By those gauges, yes, the dollar is hitting new lows or close to them.
...But this is an error. Far better is looking at the dollar against a broad market basket of currencies weighted for the amount of trade they do with the U.S. When you do, you see that while it’s true the greenback has slumped in recent months, over the long term it’s not down at all. And why has the dollar fallen recently?
(Excerpt) Read more at epaper.investors.com ...
LOL!
My assertions? More like the facts showing what we manufacture. 80% more than Japan. 129% more than China. If you think that's of no account, well, we've already seen your poor grasp of the truth.
Those facts...when you dig beneath the glossy headlines... say otherwise. Your manufacturing claims (which are not facts) are truly HOLLOW
Did that link show we didn't manufacture $1.79 trillion in 2005? I didn't think so.
You're missing the point. We CAN build computers. If the cost of computers from China goes thru the roof tomorrow because of the declining dollar, then we'll build our own, and we'll even export them and use the proceeds to buy whatever we want.
The main thing we can't do here is produce oil. That's one thing we'll have to buy from abroad. And it's the largest single component of the trade deficit, so it's gonna drag down the dollar.
If we want to strengthen the dollar, then the way to do it is to find ways to import less oil.
And that we IMPORTED what we used to manufacture for ourselves...what, almost $2 trillion???
That is not the kind of thing which can be turned around on a dime. And that is precisely the situation of vulnerability to a severing of our supply lines that we should be more wary of. Especially as the old Communists Alliances with the Jihadists and Latin America gets rolling...
The main thing we can't do here is produce oil.
That is a matter of choice. Physically the Oil is here...and we CAN drill for it.
Yes. It does. Especially when it is the things we used to be able to make for ourselves. And are still essential. And can now be cut off at the whim of enemies.
Not smart.
No. It doesn't. You said:
Now we have blithely assumed that manufacturing is of no account..
You should tell the people who made the $1.79 trillion of manufactured goods last year that it was "of no account".
Especially when it is the things we used to be able to make for ourselves. And are still essential. And can now be cut off at the whim of enemies.
Examples?
It's a given, though, that we won't drill. It's not a given that we won't make computers. Or furniture, or textiles, or steel, or aluminum, or...
Examples?
Oh, you mean you keep forgetting Magnequench and super-magnets? That is merely one of many deleterious examples.
Did you find the name of the Fed official who sets foreign T-Bill rates yet? LOL!
Toddsterpatriot finally admits:
Yeah, you have one example. Any more?
Does that mean your supposedly non-senile brain function finally remembers? LOL!
Anyways, since you concede that IS "an example" you must realize (although you won't admit) the case is made.
So in that situation...more examples should not be required.
And yes, there are vastly more than you can handle. So what would you actually DO with the extra examples? H'mmmm? File them the same place you filed...and COMPLETELY forgot...Magnequench?
You also forgot the near train-wreck with our Swiss "Allies"? That was a real example, since swept under the rug for diplomacy's sake. But there was a real blockage. For political reasons. And if they hadn't resolved them...our JDAMs would have been useless. They finessed it publically, saying they weren't military components...to belligerents...which they could not approve, and then reclassified them as "dual use" components...where were allowed. But not until we had already been forced to try and reconstitute a U.S. capability at severe cost...and real risk. H'mmm makes me feel real comfortable outsourcing to our friends in Europe. Let alone to China. Our experience in Iraq instructs us that "trading partners" does not translate into "military allies."
Indeed, if I were simply to reprint here for your enjoyment, the entire Congressional Hearings from 2003, or the DSB Report from March 2006, or February 2006, or February 2005 on Microchip Supply, you would likely complain of being dumped on. Okay, let's just reprint an excerpt from a SMALL SUMMARY opinion piece by Alan Tonelson which reiterates some key facts that destroy your postion. Leaving you no basis for your continued...and completely unwarranted...complacency:
Memo to Bush and McCain: National Security Requires Industrial Independence, TooPinging your lobby here for your...and their...much needed education....
Alan Tonelson, U.S. Business & Industry Council
Tuesday, February 14, 2006President Bush shocked the world when he declared in his latest State of the Union address, “America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.” He then unveiled proposals to bolster the nation’s security and economy by ending most of this “addiction” by 2025.
Bush’s remarks on energy independence came on the heels of a more colorful but similar warning by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain: “We better understand the vulnerability that our economy and our very lives have...when we’re dependent on Iranian mullahs and wackos in Venezuela.”
No one can know whether Bush or McCain is the slightest bit serious about this issue. The president, though, could establish some bona fides quickly by telling ExxonMobil to cool it with its insistence on energy defeatism. Scant days after the State of the Union, ExxonMobil Senior Vice President Stuart McGill told a conference that energy independence is an illusion, at least in the short and medium-term. That should prompt a Presidential rebuke on the order of: “This kind of talk has cost us thirty years of energy independence progress since the first big OPEC price hikes. More of the same will only produce further dangerous delay. The sooner we start to liberate ourselves from the Persian Gulf’s grip, the sooner we’ll succeed.”
Bush and McCain, of course, don’t get worked up about imports lightly. They’re among the nation’s staunchest trade ideologues, unshaken in their positions – even by U.S. deficits growing so large and so fast that they are threatening American and global financial stability. Clearly, Bush and McCain and so many others see oil as a special case: First, it powers so much of our economy. Second, effective substitutes for transportation uses are difficult to develop. Finally, imports reached 68.4 percent of total U.S. oil consumption in 2005 – up from about 58 percent just five years ago.
But if they ever became genuinely interested in America's strategic vulnerabilities, theyd discover that oil-like dependency situations are now shot through the entire U.S. manufacturing and even high-tech services sectors.
At the end of last year, the Census Bureau finally published the detailed economic statistics needed to bring up to 2004 USBIC’s research on the share of U.S. industrial markets captured by imports and how these percentages have changed over time. We’ll be publishing the full numbers on these import penetration rates shortly, but anyone – including Bush and McCain – who think it’s just the energy and automotive and cheap consumer goods sectors that have been overrun by foreign competition had better listen up.
Yes, even though foreign producers have set up transplant factories around the United States, vehicles made overseas are still taking sales from their Made-in-the-USA counterparts. Imports represented about half of U.S. auto consumption in 1997 (the year when the main government system for classifying different parts of the U.S. economy was introduced). By 2004, this share had climbed to 67 percent.
The situation is just about as bad in heavy duty trucks, where the import penetration rate spiked from 62.5 percent in 1997 to more than 73 percent in 2003, before settling back to 61 percent in 2004.
Examining import penetration rates also makes clear why so much of the U.S.-owned auto parts industry is either in receivership or struggling to avoid it. From 1997 to 2004, imports boosted their share of the total U.S. parts market (including tires) from about 20 to roughly 30 percent. In sub-sectors like lighting equipment, steering and suspension equipment, and transmission and power train parts, foreign-made products roughly doubled their share of U.S. markets.
The auto parts figures also show how this kind of trade is anything but win-win for everyone. Even despite heavy market-share losses from 1997 to 2002, U.S. parts makers were still able to take advantage of a buoyant economy to increase their output by nearly nine percent. But more recently, the party has stopped. Growth inched up only 0.35 percent from 2002 to 2004, yet imports kept winning customers.
But enough about autos, since they're a mere four percent of the nation’s entire economy and have only undergirded the American middle class for decades, and since the ability to make ground transportation equipment obviously has never had anything to do with national security and never will. [ /SARCASM OFF ]
As the Defense Department keeps insisting, most of the major weapons platforms used by the U.S. military are U.S.-brand products built in the United States. At the same time, all of these major defense systems are comprised of thousands upon thousands of individual parts and components, and the import penetration rate figures show that these items increasingly are made overseas.
Between 1997 and 2004, the import share of the U.S. aircraft engine and engine parts market (military and civilian alike) increased from just under 40 percent to just under 52 percent. America’s biggest foreign suppliers are a mixed bag geopolitically. In the lead is France, which hasn’t exactly been backed U.S. foreign policy to the hilt since we liberated Paris from the Germans, followed by so-far-reliable Britain.
Then come two countries that seemed pretty unhappy with America’s international goals for years until voters recently elected friendlier leaders by razor-thin margins – Canada (which by U.S. law is part of the American defense manufacturing base) and Germany.
These countries, of course, are hardly “unstable” or led by “wackos,” pace Bush and McCain. And according to the Defense Department, even French and German defense suppliers have seemed completely unaffected by their governments’ positions during the Iraq War. But no prudent leader would take their continued dependability for granted – especially over the longer term and especially since it may take only one politically inspired supply cutoff to produce a major battlefield defeat.
America’s foreign dependency situation is much worse in electronics components, which are used in virtually every modern military system for vital purposes ranging from power to guidance to navigation to communications.
More than 56 percent of the electron tubes used in the United States are imported, as are nearly 69 percent of the resistors, nearly half of the electric coils, transformers, and inductors, nearly 99 percent (that’s right – 99 percent) of the capacitors and parts, and nearly 61 percent of a broad catch-all electronic components category.
Indeed, in 2003, when Congress was debating tightening up the Buy American provisions governing Defense Department procurement, the thoroughly globalized high-tech industry in this country went into total panic mode. In the process, the industry wound up admitting how little production it has kept in the United States.
According to the Information Technology Association of America, “If all procurement of commercial information technology products by the Department of Defense were conducted under the terms of the Buy American Act...procurement would come to a crashing halt. Even at the current domestic minimum of 50%, much less under the proposed domestic content minimum of 65%...few if any commercial information technology products are capable of meeting Buy American Act requirements.”
ITAA’s solution – and the solution pushed hard and successfully by the rest of the defense industry and the outsourcing lobby: Keep the Buy American requirements where they are and keep making it easier for defense suppliers to replace their U.S.-made parts and components with foreign products whenever the short-term bottom line will benefit. And no two public servants parroted the outsourcers’ line more energetically than President Bush and Senator McCain.
The United States is doing somewhat better in semiconductors – where only about 43 percent of our domestic supply is imported, and the broad industry has actually gained a bit of home market share in recent years. Yet as a 2005 Defense Science Board (DSB) report found, “Most leading edge wafer production facilities (foundries), with the exception so far of IBM and possibly Texas Instruments, are controlled and located outside the United States.”
The DSB went on to specify that “the driving forces behind the ‘alienation’ of foundry business from the United States to other countries” include a raft of interventions in free markets by foreign governments to bring semiconductor fabrication to their shores. The Board might have added “interventions that recent U.S. trade policy has almost completely ignored.”
DoD is worried enough about the trend to have approved the construction of a “trusted foundry” in the United States. From the foundry, IBM will supply the military with computer chips whose designs will remain safely classified and that will be free of “Trojan Horses” and other sabotage mechanisms that could be inserted by foreign producers.
Yet the DSB warns that this lone foundry can only be the first step in even slowing hollowing out of the domestic chip industry, as not only manufacturing but research, development, engineering, and design move offshore. I’m still waiting for Bush and McCain even to mention the problem, much less explain how their relentless support for the giveaway trade agreements and the outsourcing they have facilitated can fail to keep worsening the situation, and undercutting American security.
Finally there’s the problem of machine tools. They’re used in the production of virtually all defense systems. Yet foreign-based producers have captured nearly 89 percent of the U.S. market for metal-cutting tools and more than 72 percent of the U.S. market for metal-forming tools.
That’s why during the 2003 Buy American debate, the outsourcing-addicted major defense contractors eagerly cited a DoD assessment that if the new, more stringent tooling guidelines were approved, “It would take well into the next decade to produce the required replacement tools. There are many cases where American tools do not currently exist [ anymore anyways ] and new production lines would have to be built to produce them. U.S. machine tool builders currently have neither the ability nor capacity to meet an increased demand....It will take at least ten years to make the American machine tool industry viable again, especially in the ultra-precision market in which America does not participate.”
But again, the outsourcing lobby, Bush, and McCain all firmly agreed that the best answer to a foreign dependency situation that has clearly spun out of control was “more of the same.”
So the next time President Bush and Senator McCain talk about the national security imperative of greater energy independence, or about any national security issue, Americans will be entitled to express more than a little skepticism. And I, for one, would forgive them if the term “wacko” kept coming to mind.
_____________________________________________________
Alan Tonelson is a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business & Industry Educational Foundation
Also fellow national-security-concerneds to this thread to examine your little lobbying outfit's continued and malicious influence-peddling of the sinister kind...against national defense. The Toddster Lobby doesn't think national security...is hazarded by their "free trade."
Mindless trade heedless of Foreign Interventions where, as one consequence, they are allowing the "Invisible Hand" to become Transmogrified into "The Chinese Fist."
Not my fault that I'm younger and clearer thinking than you.
the case is made.
Is China the only source of these magnets? Do we have a strategic reserve of them? If the answers are yes and no, then we're already doomed. That was easy.
You also forgot the near train-wreck with our Swiss "Allies"? That was a real example, since swept under the rug for diplomacy's sake. But there was a real blockage. For political reasons. And if they hadn't resolved them...our JDAMs would have been useless.
Yeah, that was terrible. We should now make those parts ourselves.
which reiterates some key facts that destroy your postion(sic).
Destroy my position that we made $1.79 trillion in manufactured goods last year? How does that work again?
Also fellow national-security-concerneds to this thread to examine your little lobbying outfit's continued and malicious influence-peddling of the sinister kind...against national defense.
Maybe Paul would have an example where anyone has lobbied against national defense?
What I'm getting is something about how America's weaker militarily now than we were back in 1997 with Clinton because US manufacturers are not making as many strategic products as before. If that's what you're saying then you probably already know how unconvincing it sounds. If that's not what you're saying, then see if you can state it better, and please take the time to make it brief and without posting another 2,000 word tract.
U.S." manufactures is obviously outweighted by the importsThat doesn't make any sense. We're making more than ever before. Huge amounts of goods are coming out of the factories and are being sold for more money than ever before. It's real, and it's been counted.
Our buying lots of imports can't possibly make the production records and all time high sales profits magically disappear.
What's happened with American trade and industry is that over the past decade our factories have increased production to the equivalent of a jillion new combat trucks, and Ross is saying that this is bad because we've also gotten rich enough to import a jillion new tires for these trucks.
-- and he's saying we had more military power before?
With Paul's penchant for quoting from left wing sources like E.P.I. I've always though it important to find another source to confirm (or deny) what he's asserting.
Q: In all of your meetings and discussions, did you hear of any other examples beyond that one?
Spencer: No. That's it! That's it! First of all, the Swiss company came around and said, "There was a mistake, here is your JDAM crystal." And, by the way, the manufacturers themselves got on a plane and figured out a way to get new ones. Within that amount of time not one Iraqi target went un-bombed. So until you start showing me some evidence that you're not going to have access -- after we have just gone through this war -- then I'm not buying it.
Manufacturing and Technology News
I'm not saying Paul's take is wrong, just that we should always consider the source.
Thanks, I should have known better than to trust Paul or his sources, even a little.
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