price of dollars

The lowest cost vehicle one can buy today is approaching $20,000, just eight years ago one could buy a full size car for $25,000.

I was always taught that when you pay with inflated paper dollars, the seller can lose and the buyer shrugs off some of his actual debt. Really humps you in international business.

The chinese do not want to change the value of their currency and they keep the wages low. Same for some other countries. The big mac index is used to show the real value of money in different countries. By not allowing wages to go up the jobs go to those countries. Many big international companies are increasing their numbers of employees in total but the increase is all in low wage countries and we in the high price countries lose jobs. GM is growing and profitable in china. The wars usa is paying for in various countries is costly in more ways than one. They make usa less popular and they make the dollar worth less. So what would happen if usa stopped sending troups and printing dollars? The real question is what happens when other countries stop wanting to use dollars and they start flowing back. I guess the price of the big mac is going to go up a lot. There are already some countries like china and russia wanting to stop using as much dollars in their trade. The oil producers are starting to go away from the dollars in their contracts. The price of gold is going up and up.

Oil producers will try to stay with the currency that is the most stable. At one point this was the dollar, and later it slid toward the Euro. Lately the Euro has had some signs of weakness. It will all come out in the wash.

Gold, IMO, is overvalued. I have gone through this before, and have seen gold go up because people had no confidence in paper currency. Gold could drop like a rock if the dollar regains high stability. Investment diamonds are another way that you can put a fortune in very hard value in your pocket and get across the border to a friendlier country.

I remember looking at the price of a Cadillac and wondering how people could afford a car that was $5000.

Government wins and everyone else looses when government prints money.

But government is broke. Too bad you couldn't buy a million big macs today and sell them 10-15 years down the road.

But you are on the right track. It isn't that the cost of a big mac went up, it is that the value of the dollar went down.

The real reason is that it devalues the $2 trillion USD that the the US Government owes them.

Say 6 Yuan is 1 USD. If they let the USD sink, to say 3:1 then the value in Yuan is 1/2 as much. Bad deal for China. Good deal for corrupt US government.

Sooner or later the Chinese will realize they will never see the value of the $2 trillion as Washington DC never plans to pay it off. As this happens, the USD will sink, and perhaps Yuan will be worth more than a USD...at which point people will realize the full hyper-inflationary effect of this.

Given China is no longer buying US debt like it used to, DC has resorted to bank ponzi scheme of having a government bank create money, expand it and loan it back, in short buying its own bonds. A real ponzi scheme for sure.

Which will translate into a combination of inflation and deflation at the same time. Discretionary stuff must deflate as people will not buy it. Real estate will too. But world commodity essentials will stay high or higher like oil, wheat, food.

Is gold over valued or did the currencies loose their value? It is relative.

Why would they want to get rid of the dollar? The dollar is the most stable currency in the world because the free capitalist economy in US is the most stable economy in the world.

That was before the government put the EPA and the NHTSA into the car business.

Thirty years ago the average working man was in the 15% tax bracket. Today he is in the 28% tax bracket. If the Dims get their way he will soon be in the 32% bracket and by the time he is, they will have raised it back to the

Today >> A few years ago you needed 15 cents to buy one big mac.

By the time those thirty year US Bonds come due they can be easily paid off with BO(ZOs) inflated dollars.

Perhaps but the poverty line is $600 a year and who knows how many millions of them at 2.8% of the population? A person living in poverty is the US is rich compared to someone in China. One could become a millionaire just selling one pair of SHOES to the average person in China LOL

Yep.

Loan the US government $40k today.

In 20 years get maybe $45k back. But wait, that $40k car today will cost you $100k in 20 years.

Your money depreciated by $55k. Who wins is governemtn debtors as they will pay you with depreciated 20 year money.

Also part of why in 2008 the ruse was no one was lending money. Of course not, the valuation was wrong as interest rates were too low. Government caused it.

Yep, tax creep. Say you are going to "tax the rich" and over time, inflation gets the middle class into the higher income ta bracket. Happens because of government statism greed.

I will predict, that as l> Thirty years ago the average working man was in the 15% tax bracket. Today

Lots of variables. But it all points to China is a better run country than the US. Lower debt, more jobs, real growth above inflation, modernizing fast and not decaying. Compared to the US the Chinese government owes nothing, and in fact is in surpluses the US has never ever seen. Taxes for the average joe are quite low too.

China is effectively an authoritarian capitalist. Highly efficient government compared to the US.

What keeps the world from economic collapse is that China is buying the commodities the US no longer buys.

And Wash> Perhaps but the poverty line is $600 a year and who knows how many millions

In message , Canuck57 writes

This is why all governments world wide borrow, because inflation beats interest rates, they win hands down. People buy government bonds because they pay better than the banks, but still way below inflation.

$40k car today will

It is a very complicated game. It has to do with distribution of welth as well production and use of goods. Lets say A and B work for a day and they each get a bar of chocolate as pay. A eats his bar but B only eats half the bar. Next day same happens again. After this day A has nothing but B has a whole bar. If this continues then B will accumulate a lot of chocolate bars and A has nothing. After some time B can stop working and just enjoy all his chocolate but A must keep on working. In a communist society lets say B has accumulated 1000 bars of chocolate. The government would like to take half of Bs bars and give them to A. In a capitalist society the government wants to borrow half Bs bars and lend it to A but A never pays them back again and so the situation becomes the same in both systems. There are different needs and it is difficult to accommodate all. With a simple system it may seem easy to see what is right and what is fair but the more complex it gets the same principles are at work but it is difficult to say what is fair. Lots of people do not do any work and still get chocolate bars. Others steal from their neighbors one way or another.