Word: dollarization
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...nonobvious answer is: the central banks of emerging economies. To keep their currencies from appreciating too much against the dollar, emerging nations continue to buy increasingly large amounts of U.S. debt. This provides the U.S. with an indirect funding source to prop up its banks and brokerages, but it's a compromised solution. After all, the willingness of central banks to lend almost without limit to America helped create this mess. Cheap money from abroad suppressed U.S. long-term interest rates, helping to set the stage for the housing bubble and its catastrophic collapse. Continuing such inappropriate monetary and exchange...
...SWFs, on the other hand, control more than $3 trillion, an amount that is growing rapidly. That money needs a home, and the weak U.S. dollar presents foreign investors with opportunities to put it to work by snapping up "bargains" like the Chrysler Building and Citigroup stock. But after turning to SWFs in their hour of need last winter, will U.S. and European officials be willing to do so again...
...this activism comes at a price. The Fed's rate cuts have fueled inflation and undermined the dollar, now trading at about $1.60 to the euro. The Treasury's willingness to backstop Fannie and Freddie, which together are on the hook for $5.2 trillion in mortgage debt--just slightly less than what the U.S. government owes investors--is already sparking a bit of worry about the soundness of T-bills and bonds. With more bailouts, that worry could snowball...
...some extent, every economic transaction is psychological. There's no inherent value to a house, a stock or even the U.S. dollar--just the value on which a buyer and seller can agree. IndyMac bank failed because of a perception that it was dangerously overextended. Once the panic began, the reality was irrelevant. McCain himself has argued that eliminating a moratorium on offshore drilling would have a positive "psychological impact" that could reduce gas prices...
...opium crop in Nangarhar, for instance, was driven by the will and charisma of a local governor and owed little to Western-funded "capacity-building" seminars. The greatest recent improvements in local government have come about through the replacement of local governors rather than through hundred-million-dollar training programs. Since these successes are often difficult to predict, we should invest in numerous smaller opportunities rather than bet all our chips on a few large programs...