Dollar Follies

So I saw this post on Atrios yesterday, regarding the dollar's current freefall against the Euro (and darn near everything else), but what really caught my eye was the comments thread. It seems that you can place a lot of peoples' reactions into one of two categories:

• Almost-manic glee: Boy, maybe this presages total economic armageddon for the United States! That'll sure show those people who voted to re-elect George Bush!
• Smugness in Europe's superiority: These people are just fleeing to quality -- it shows you that the Eurozone is much more financially sound! Hopefully I can move there before it's too late!

Um, friends? How about we don't jump up and down like giddy schoolgirls, hoping for America's economic collapse? Because if a second Great Depression does come, it's not going to pass over you or me just because we've both got a John Kerry For President T-shirt folded up at the back of our underwear drawer. I'm not holding any faith in Bush and his advisers either -- but that doesn't mean that I'm not really hoping for them to somehow pull us through in spite of themselves.

And what candyland are you "Europe is so much stronger!" people living in? Someplace where the Eurozone member nations aren't also running up giant budget deficits and suffering from unemployment rates that are two/three/four times America's? It seems, as ever, that there are two Europes -- the real Europe, and the "if things get much worse here, I'm moving there" fantasy-Europe of the liberal imagination.

(Note: Atrios' post is just a dynamic graph of the Euro's current price; since there's no currency trading on the weekend, it won't give you any useful information if you try to click through today. Try this graph of the three-month trend instead.)

Posted by Kevin at December 4, 2004 11:25 AM