Word: traded
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...running a federal deficit that could hit $2 trillion this year only because of the dollar's status as global reserve currency. But borrowing trillions isn't really a ticket to long-run prosperity. In fact, the current economic crisis may have been spawned by huge imbalances in global trade and capital flows that are in part the product of the dollar's special status. Global demand for dollars supplanted demand for U.S. products and services, argues Columbia University economist and longtime SDR fan Joseph Stiglitz, resulting in trade deficits, the decline of U.S. manufacturing - and years of supereasy mortgage...
Shift those foreign dollar reserves into SDRs, the reasoning goes, and global finance suddenly becomes much more balanced. By no longer needing to load up on dollars, countries like China would have less incentive to run big trade surpluses with the U.S. This line of thought goes back to English economist John Maynard Keynes - the source of seemingly every important economic idea of this crisis-racked time - who first proposed what he called "supernational bank money" in 1930. During the economic turmoil of his day, he kept refining the idea and proposing odd names for the currency - first "grammor...
...Jobs Are a Strategy Too Long before the U.S. arrived in Afghanistan, the Korengal was relatively rich. It wasn't farming that sustained the area's residents; the rocky hillsides grow few crops. But a lucrative trade in the region's cedar forests funded satellite-TV dishes and fancy four-wheel-drive trucks. Local lore holds that the fight with the Americans began in earnest when the U.S., acting on a tip from a rival tribe, dropped a bomb on the lumber mill of a local chief, killing some of his relatives and leading to a campaign of vengeance...
...fight in the Korengal is directed and funded by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord who was once backed by the U.S. and has links to al-Qaeda. Nevertheless, says valley elder Sham Sher Khan, the way to counter the insurgency hasn't changed. He thinks reopening the timber trade would help. "The Taliban say they are fighting because there are Americans here and it's a jihad. But the fact is, they aren't fighting for religion. They are fighting for money," he says. "If they had jobs, they would stop fighting...
...small fraction of the insurgency consists of hardened jihadis willing to fight to the death; the rest are ordinary, poor villagers who simply haven't been given a better option. Khan estimates that the insurgents earn from $100 to $200 a month, money that comes from the illegal trade in lumber. Similarly, analysts in Afghanistan's south, where U.S. and coalition forces are fighting an insurgency funded by the opium trade, argue that the U.S. policy of poppy eradication has only fueled the fighting by eliminating income without providing an alternative...