A Falling Dollar Gives Us All Something To Panic About
According to the financial buzz online, no one is sugar-coating the whole dollar tanking issue anymore.
Dollar’s Fall Is Scary but Not a Reason to Panic, Kiplinger’s tells us the dollar will plummet but eventually rebound. National Intelligence Director Michael McConnell has said the falling dollar is a weakness potentially expolitable by U.S. rivals, especially those with energy reserves we want and need. CNN released an article yesterday about the dollar value reaching a 12-year low vs. yen and how it’s at an all-time low versus the Euro (which to be fair has only been around for a few years). Plenty of people are talking about this, but our government officials are noticeably silent. It’s like people are only supposed to think we are in a recession/crisis if Ben Bernacki says so. But why would he?
Anyway, I’ve been watching all these doom and gloom dollar headlines all over the web the last few days and had to round some of them up for you all. Experts are all predicting how low the dollar (and how high the oil prices) will get and when things will turn around.
To me, this sounds a lot like predicting the outcome of a sports game, or deciding who will win an Oscar. There are clearly some of us with more information than others but all opinions are still on the table. Pre-Superbowl, I watched three out of four pros in really nice suits pick the Patriots as the winners. I picked the Colts and was within two points of the final score at the end of the game. I saw no football the whole season (and know nothing about the sport in general) and somehow, I made a better call than “the experts”. Of course experts can’t always be right. That’s why we watch the Oscars even if insert-movie-here is the predicted winner. We can speculate just like the experts because no one really knows for sure.
In the end, the market goes up, the market goes down. It’s cyclic in a way no one can know for sure. So in part because I’m an optimist and in part because I have my own ideas, I think I’m just going to sit back and watch how this all plays out…Heck, I may even make some popcorn, because at the very least, it should be an interesting show.