Book Larnin

Well, the shit has hit the fan. One of the emerging themes of these endeavors is that those blinded by data, they ignore history and events, get it very, very wrong. I've spent more than a few keystrokes in these musings berating the deficit hawks. The least intelligent are the trade deficit hawks. The Almighty Buck really is New Gold, and in order for the global economy to prosper and expand, there has to be a steady flow of bucks into all those other countries. That flow only happens if we run a current account trade deficit. Surprise, surprise.

[Hyun Song Shin, the head of research at the Bank of International Settlements] concerns also center on the global banking system and the possibility that the dollar's rise will accentuate what he refers to as an emerging dearth of dollars, which could bring back memories of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009, when a global rush into dollars created a liquidity panic.

"What's good for General Motors is good for the United States." May be not so much for the rest of the world.

Here's the best part:

During such eras of dollar strength, global central banks were forced to dip into their reserves to defend their weakening currencies, leading to what some economists are now calling quantitative tightening.

That would be the flip side of quantitative easing, the policy of the past decade where central banks have flooded the world with cash in a bid to spur growth and combat deflation.

Why the best? I read a dead trees NYT while sipping my one cup of coffee at Panera. I got to that part of the story, and circled "inflation" and noted "deflation". By the time I got around to typing this missive, the innterTubes version was corrected, with a note saying so. Gotcha.