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Why is a burger lunch a hundred bucks and a bottle of water $5? Because for some reason, every time you come to London you stay in SW3 - Kensington and Knightsbridge - the most expensive place you can possibly pick in a city that's not the cheapest to begin with.

Feel free to ask for better London suggestions next time :) Try Hoxton, maybe. There's several hotels to choose from around the City Road/Shoreditch High Street area, it's where almost all London's tech companies live and the local shop prices don't have a "tourist tax" of 100-200%. Plus it's walking distance to Brick Lane.

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Fast forward to a marketplace with almost no regulation, multi-trillion dollar "hedge funds" AKA Ponzi Schemes with no accountability and you can see a disaster in the making.

On top of this add the "free trade" movement to offshore all of our manufacturing capabilities, as started in the 1980s. This has now resulted in burger flipping being reclassified as "manufacturing" to help cook the books.

The song says "We won't get fooled again"... we obviously didn't learn the lessons of Viet Nam... they all died in vain, as our all our troops in Iraq, along with the 650,000 civilians we've killed along the way.

We didn't learn when a 5% disruption of world oil supply caused the price to triple in the OPEC embargo in the early 70's... so we now can't even run our civilization without flooding the world with our decreasingly valued dollars.

The situation is bleak... we need a president who can look at this huge mess, and honestly face it, and lead us out of it

It's going to get worse... at least in the 1930s we had raw materials, our own oil, and glut of manufacturing capabilities... now we have a system which burns the most valuable form of energy ever found on the planet, to move people to the store to pick up bottles of water from foreign countries.

We're fucked!

We chose this life, we're going to reap what we sowed.

May God forgive us all, and have some mercy.

--Mike--

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Deficit spending is a huge contributor to the tanking dollar. Huge foreign debt is another. I am also sure that a failure of confidence in the U.S. economy (as well as the government) is another.

The question I meant to ask, but didn't, had to do with the U.K.'s decision to stay with its own currency. Was that part of it as well?

Unfortunately for this trip the Knightsbridge Green (among the "cheapest" hotels in SW3) was an independent variable -- planned (not by me, though it doesn't matter) months ago. On future trips I'll economize around location as well as other considerations.

Trust me, this is the last time I'll stay there. And not just because of the cost.

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It's simpler than all that, and less ominous to boot. Our country has had a "weak dollar" policy for some time now, for a couple of intentional reasons:

1) We want to encourage more U.S. exports by making them cheaper to overseas buyers, which will (hopefully) reduce the growth in our trade deficit. When the dollar becomes cheap to foreigners, they are more likely to visit us and leave their Euros in our hotels and restaurants, and perhaps they'll start importing more of our goods as well. Remember, it doesn't do the American economy any good for Americans to spend all their money in Europe, we want the Europeans to spend all of their money over here. The government is not at all unhappy with the weak dollar.

2) We are keeping our interest rates low because we are trying to steer away from the risk of falling into recession (a risk which is heightened by rising oil prices), but the result of this is that international investors would rather hold Sterling which will give them a higher return. When investors sell dollars in order to buy Sterling, the cost of dollars goes down and the cost of the Sterling goes up. UK interest rates are substantially higher than ours right now, causing the Pound exchange rate to be particularly painful.

Finally, the interesting problem with #1 above is that the most important currency to our trade deficit, the Chinese renmimbi, is artificially pegged to the dollar rather than allowed to reflect its real value, which should be much higher. As a result, Chinese goods are still artificially cheap to us so we keep on buying them, aggravating the trade deficit. I'm no fan of this administration, but they have been doing the right thing by pressuring China to let their currency float (which of course they have no intention of doing).

Steve

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Context please.

Dave

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