We Have a Drug Problem

Well... I was busy fighting with a bad tempered M900 and ubuntu, waiting to rant about Mad Dictator Don's drug issue. Imagine my luck when the wholly reliable Derek Lowe picks up the cudgel. You must read. It's longer than your usual innterTubes post, but the essence is in the details. One last offering shows he knows a bit about econ.

That's because the dollar was considered the most important reserve currency in the world, and the yields on US Treasuries set the pace for interest rates around the globe.

Long ago, some finance minister or such complained that the USofA's major unfair advantage (and still is, btw) was the right/ability to borrow in our own currency. That might sound like a small detail. It isn't. There was a conflagration amongst the Right Wingnut econ types when Nixon detached the US buck from gold, and, so it was opined, shitcanned Bretton Woods. What a stupid thing to do, they said. Not a bit of it. "Ditching" Bretton Woods was the best advantage the US Buck ever got. That simple act made the US Buck the globe's reserve currency. And we stole it. China's goal is to take that status for themselves. Idiots like Mad Dictator Don doesn't get it. (He claims that his BA in 'real estate econ' from Wahrton makes him a genius! Yeah.) We are "Great" not because we have more nukes than anyone else, or fiddle many elections in the second and third worlds, but because the US Buck is the basis of global trade. Toss that away, and we're, at best, a second world country.

Over the last couple of months, at least prior to the latest spasm, the notable action was that the Big Bucks crowd was moving vast amounts of money to Treasuries.