The Financial Times: Obama Perceived as Weak

[Dari]

Originally posted by: Brainonska511

Originally posted by: Dari

Originally posted by: Robor
The economy collapsed, Iran gave the finger to the world, and NK developed their nuke program while GWB was in office and we didn't hear a peep about weakness in the presidency. Now it's on Obama? BS. This is nothing but more right wing FUD.

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
If you ask my dad, Obama and Co. hate and despise what America is and want to see it destroyed.

Sorry to hear your dad is a moron ditto head.

Sorry but Bush is no longer in office. Obama wanted and campaigned for this job. Since the 9 months he's been here there has been no movement from Iran, Israel, Russia or any other problems he's inherited. He has done nothing. Perhaps he can turn it around.

No movement on Iran? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10...middleeast/02nuke.html

Helping to get Iran to agree to ship nuclear material to Russia and France so it can be processed down to use in nuclear plants and not weapons is doing nothing?

GENEVA ? Iran agreed on Thursday in talks with the United States and other major powers to open its newly revealed uranium enrichment plant near Qum to international inspection in the next two weeks and to send most of its openly declared enriched uranium outside Iran to be turned into fuel for a small reactor that produces medical isotopes, senior American and other Western officials said.

Iran?s agreement in principle to export most of its enriched uranium for processing ? if it happens ? would represent a major accomplishment for the West, reducing Iran?s ability to make a nuclear weapon quickly and buying more time for negotiations to bear fruit

This is like throwing a bone to Obama to hold off the Israeli attack-dogs. But if you want to call that progress...

 

[Moonbeam]

We don't have a weak dollar because Obama is weak, we have it because of what a number of people here have pointed out. We have a weak dollar by design, to boost exports and create and preserve manufacturing jobs.

 

[BigDH01]

Originally posted by: glenn1

Originally posted by: BigDH01

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
It use to be that I would see a "dying Dollar" article once a month, now it's like I am seeing one every other day or so.

Could this be the result of having a weak President?

From North Korea launching more missiles, Iran giving the world the finger, and the anti-Dollar drumbeat growing from China and Russia, it is clear that the world is enjoying having a weak US President.

I don't see why anyone is addressing the "Dollar strength" issue. I mean, if the Dollar does truly collapse then our incomes and savings become worthless on the world stage. We won't be able to afford squat.

Deficits. Debt. Dollar Strength.

These are the REAL problems we should all be caring about.

Why do you want such a strong dollar? Is it so you can keep buying cheap imported crap even while it means that production is shipped overseas and most people buying this crap are buying it with money lent to them from those countries acquiring said production?

I just don't get it. Everyone seems to bemoan a weaker dollar, but I haven't heard any real justification as to why. The incomes and savings aspect of it seems to be a red herring. If the dollar collapsed, manufacturers could move to this country and make money exporting. If I can buy blue jeans that are manufactured in Texas from cotton grown in the Carolinas, why do I care if a Euro costs $2.00? Is this a nationalism thing? Do we want a strong dollar simply so we can say we have a strong currency?

Why, so we can have the same sort of thriving industrial economy as Bangaladesh? Manufacturing jobs are now in permanent decline in this country due to automation even as the industry produces the same or more amount of output; see what happened to farming in the 20th century. Do you pine for the millions of lost subsitence farming jobs lost in the U.S. in the past 100 years or so as much as you do the back-breaking, spirit-crushing assembly line jobs of the industrial American age?

No, I don't. But even automated factories moving back to the US means some skilled labor jobs, construction jobs, transportation jobs, logistics jobs, etc, also move back, and all the secondary jobs associated with them. If manufacturing is in a permanent state of decline, I'd rather it decline here.

What we have now is obviously unsustainable. In my opinion, the first inkling of a serious underlying issue occurred in the 70s with stagflation. We then began the paradigm of supply-side economics, or "we'll produce our way out of inflation." That's great, but public and private debt exploded around this time as people purchased this new supply. That worked until the bubble economies began in the late 90s. Deflated once to be built again, with people using new instruments of debt to purchase this supply as jobs became more skilled, harder to get (more education required), and wages stagnated for the majority of us. Now we have a situation were most people have little to no net value and little means to increase their debt load. It's a failure of demand.

Now, making the US more competitive in exports won't solve the above underlying problem, but it will reduce some pressure. In reality, many people and jobs simply aren't needed. We don't really need full staffing in factories and we don't need many people to grow food. We don't need a lot of people to provide the basic needs of everyone. Unfortunately, this really means that some people are more "expensive" to keep alive than what they are valued by the market. If a person is only capable of working in a factory and is replaced by a robot, then while it may be cheaper to keep them alive than it used to be, their value in the market is basically zero (note: I am only talking about the market, not making any normative statement about their aggregate value to society to be found with their family, other activities, etc). I posted about this in another thread, but you'll see this creep up as well. More people end up going into skilled labor and increasing the pool size of labor. How many analysts, programmers, etc, do you need before the individual marginal utility of a single member drops to zero? What do you do when software can replace many of these skilled laborers? Some might call this a Malthusian catastrophe and some might call this the early steps of post scarcity. If every point of production can be as automated as manufacturing, then the cost to keep someone alive should approach zero; to match the displaced workers value.

 

[SammyJr]

Originally posted by: glenn1

Originally posted by: BigDH01

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
It use to be that I would see a "dying Dollar" article once a month, now it's like I am seeing one every other day or so.

Could this be the result of having a weak President?

From North Korea launching more missiles, Iran giving the world the finger, and the anti-Dollar drumbeat growing from China and Russia, it is clear that the world is enjoying having a weak US President.

I don't see why anyone is addressing the "Dollar strength" issue. I mean, if the Dollar does truly collapse then our incomes and savings become worthless on the world stage. We won't be able to afford squat.

Deficits. Debt. Dollar Strength.

These are the REAL problems we should all be caring about.

Why do you want such a strong dollar? Is it so you can keep buying cheap imported crap even while it means that production is shipped overseas and most people buying this crap are buying it with money lent to them from those countries acquiring said production?

I just don't get it. Everyone seems to bemoan a weaker dollar, but I haven't heard any real justification as to why. The incomes and savings aspect of it seems to be a red herring. If the dollar collapsed, manufacturers could move to this country and make money exporting. If I can buy blue jeans that are manufactured in Texas from cotton grown in the Carolinas, why do I care if a Euro costs $2.00? Is this a nationalism thing? Do we want a strong dollar simply so we can say we have a strong currency?

Why, so we can have the same sort of thriving industrial economy as Bangaladesh? Manufacturing jobs are now in permanent decline in this country due to automation even as the industry produces the same or more amount of output; see what happened to farming in the 20th century. Do you pine for the millions of lost subsitence farming jobs lost in the U.S. in the past 100 years or so as much as you do the back-breaking, spirit-crushing assembly line jobs of the industrial American age?

The arrogance. You're too good for an assembly line, manufacturing job. Great. Fine. Praise Jebus. Aside from you, there are a lot of Americans who would love to have a decent factory job or any decent job at all. What other work should Americans not do?

 

[sandorski]

It was so strong under Bush. How could Obama just throw it away??

 

[yllus]

North Korea will do what it wants to do no matter how "strong" Mr. Obama appears.

Iran will do what it wants to do no matter how "strong" Mr. Obama appears.

China and Russia's complaints about the USD is more lulz than anything, considering they're the #1 and #2 foreign holders of the USD. In any case, what is Mr. Obama going to do here, give them a rousing pep talk? He has little to no control over this.

Blame the guy for things he is legitimately culpable for.

 

[Atreus21]

Originally posted by: yllus
North Korea will do what it wants to do no matter how "strong" Mr. Obama appears.

Iran will do what it wants to do no matter how "strong" Mr. Obama appears.

China and Russia's complaints about the USD is more lulz than anything, considering they're the #1 and #2 foreign holders of the USD. In any case, what is Mr. Obama going to do here, give them a rousing pep talk? He has little to no control over this.

Blame the guy for things he is legitimately culpable for.

As much as I dislike Obama, I have to agree here.

I see lots of people calling for solutions to Iran and NK. What exactly do they propose? Invading? This was a complex issue for Bush, and it's the same for Obama. This has no quick answer.

I can credit Neville Chamberlain for one thing. He hoped Hitler deep down wasn't going to turn into a mass-murderer, and that's what a sane person would do. He was wrong, but what's the alternative?

This is a very similar situation. We are hoping that for all their rhetoric, neither Iran nor North Korea will do any of the horrible things we think they might when push comes to shove. There's essentially nothing else substantive we can do, until disaster strikes.

 

[OrByte]

Originally posted by: boomerang
Somebody needs to explain to him that voting 'present' only worked in the Senate.

I don't know if he's hiding his head in the sand, whether this is due to inexperience, by design, sheer incompetence, or what. Is he running the country or is it Rahm Emanuel, Reid and Pelosi? This social agenda is all well and good, but it's dominating his agenda while in the meantime the very foundation of our nation is crumbling.

What needs to be done is the exact opposite of what is being done. His Presidency is like Carter's on steroids.

hyperbole ftw.

 

[GTaudiophile]

Dollar loses reserve status to yen & euro

Economists believe the market rebellion against the dollar will spread until Bernanke starts raising interest rates from around zero to the high single digits, and pulls back the flood of currency spewed from US printing presses.

"That's a cure, but it's also going to stifle any US economic growth," said Schiff. "The economy is addicted to the cheap interest and liquidity."

Economists warn that a jump in rates will clobber stocks and cripple the already stalled housing market.

"Bernanke's other choice is to keep rates at zero, print even more money and sell more debt, but we'll see triple-digit inflation that could collapse the economy as we know it.

"The stimulus is what's toxic -- we're poisoning ourselves and the global economy with it."