dollars

So the USD is tanking big time. (Props to washort for predicting this ages ago.) The CAD is now worth $1.07USD and rising; while the AUD (Australian Dollar), which has historically hovered around 73c to the USD for the last 10 to 15 years is gaining huge momentum and is now up to 97c to the USD.

Really makes me wish I'd had the cashflow to have invested in foreign currencies 5 or 6 years ago before Bush sank the dollar.

The best part of all of this is while the USD is tanking in value, the cost of everything is rising. Because face it, the US has become a nation of imports; we manufacture fewer and fewer things here each year. About the only prices I've seen stay relatively stable (though they were already expensive) is that of such brands as American Apparel; because their product is manufactured in LA and they tend to source their materials in the US as well. But aside from that the cost of food and fuel (which impacts the cost of anything that uses fuel in the US; namely trucking things around) are rising at rates that no one in our generation has ever seen before.

The other issue is that consumer spending is dropping like mad because of the fact that workers' wages have been stagnant if not dropping in comparison to inflation for the last 25 years. Your parents made more money fresh out of college / high school in the late 60s and early 70s than you make now with your graduate degree.

This is a downward spiral. Hopefully in the next year we can get some measure of representatives on capital hill to pull us out of the conflict in Iraq which has plunged our country deeper and deeper into debt; the fed will figure out what the fuck they're doing in regard to the current housing market crisis (a large part of the USD's tanking in the last year has been directly correlated to the housing market), and maybe give the coming-of-age top consumers (being our generation) A FUCKING BREAK ON THE STUDENT LOAN RATES ALREADY. I know they plan to drop them back to the 3-ish %s by 2012, but that is currently only for people who have not consolidated, and in some cases, only for people taking out new loans. There needs to be an across-the-board "necessary debt" rate drop. But that is another rant.

All in all, at least it is still cheap to travel to Eastern Europe (so long as you stay out of countries that have switched to Euro), much of Asia, and pretty much all of Central / South America and much of Africa.