The dollar hit its all time low under Obama, on 5/2/11 at 67.97, but this has not been much discussed even though it is surely related to the following other firsts.
On 8/5/11 Standard and Poor's downgraded the US for the first time ever, from AAA to AA+, primarily because it was looking for $4 trillion in spending cuts over ten years and only got $1 trillion in the sequestration deal.
And then on 9/2/11 it was reported that for the month of August 2011 net zero jobs had been created, the first time since World War II that a month went by without job creation.
These are remarkable and dubious firsts, three of them in a row in the span of four months.
It is clear how much two of these still rankle Obama, who views them in purely political terms instead of as injuries to all of us. In a press conference on the debt ceiling almost a year and a half later, held this last Monday, Obama brought up both the AAA rating loss and the net zero jobs milestone, seeking to blame them both on Republicans:
"And they'd better choose quickly because time is running short. The last time Republicans in Congress even flirted with this idea [of not raising the debt ceiling], our triple-A credit rating was downgraded for the first time in our history, our businesses created the fewest jobs of any month in nearly the past three years, and ironically, the whole fiasco actually added to the deficit."
The revisionist history on the jobs number is noteworthy. Who would even remember the fact now unless he brought it up?
The fact of the matter is, however, that the weak dollar, which is not even on Obama's radar screen, is the root of the problem for both our out of control debt and deficits and the dearth of jobs.
And Jeffrey Snider, coincidentally, says just as much today, here, concluding this way:
"The politics of the debt ceiling really should be concerned with monetarism rather than focused solely on spending or deficits. But that is a hard position for either party to take. Democrats won't because their interests are aligned with monetarism, while Republicans have at many times embraced monetarism with equal passion. Neither seems to want to move outside conventional economics that salutes as policy success a 64% increase in total debt without any perturbation in interest costs.
"We have not just a fiscal problem, but a persistent and massive monetary imbalance through dollar debasement that is directly related to both the debt disaster and the weak economy. Without directly facing it and working toward currency stability, we will be stuck with both the continued debt trajectory and no real growth. Neither can be adequately solved without first solving the dollar by ending capital repression."
On 8/5/11 Standard and Poor's downgraded the US for the first time ever, from AAA to AA+, primarily because it was looking for $4 trillion in spending cuts over ten years and only got $1 trillion in the sequestration deal.
And then on 9/2/11 it was reported that for the month of August 2011 net zero jobs had been created, the first time since World War II that a month went by without job creation.
These are remarkable and dubious firsts, three of them in a row in the span of four months.
It is clear how much two of these still rankle Obama, who views them in purely political terms instead of as injuries to all of us. In a press conference on the debt ceiling almost a year and a half later, held this last Monday, Obama brought up both the AAA rating loss and the net zero jobs milestone, seeking to blame them both on Republicans:
"And they'd better choose quickly because time is running short. The last time Republicans in Congress even flirted with this idea [of not raising the debt ceiling], our triple-A credit rating was downgraded for the first time in our history, our businesses created the fewest jobs of any month in nearly the past three years, and ironically, the whole fiasco actually added to the deficit."
The revisionist history on the jobs number is noteworthy. Who would even remember the fact now unless he brought it up?
The fact of the matter is, however, that the weak dollar, which is not even on Obama's radar screen, is the root of the problem for both our out of control debt and deficits and the dearth of jobs.
And Jeffrey Snider, coincidentally, says just as much today, here, concluding this way:
"The politics of the debt ceiling really should be concerned with monetarism rather than focused solely on spending or deficits. But that is a hard position for either party to take. Democrats won't because their interests are aligned with monetarism, while Republicans have at many times embraced monetarism with equal passion. Neither seems to want to move outside conventional economics that salutes as policy success a 64% increase in total debt without any perturbation in interest costs.
"We have not just a fiscal problem, but a persistent and massive monetary imbalance through dollar debasement that is directly related to both the debt disaster and the weak economy. Without directly facing it and working toward currency stability, we will be stuck with both the continued debt trajectory and no real growth. Neither can be adequately solved without first solving the dollar by ending capital repression."
