(Una disculpa por no tener suficiente tiempo para traducir el artículo)...
THE dominoes are toppling. What began as a credit crunch has turned into a dollar crunch. We are witnessing a run on the world's paramount reserve currency, an event that occurs twice a century or so, and never with a benign outcome. The US dollar has fallen through parity against the Canadian dollar and plummeted to all-time lows against a basket of currencies. This is dangerous. None of the mature economic blocs seems able to take the strain, let alone step in to restore order.
Talk of "competitive devaluations" is a new twist, although Bernard Connolly from Banque AIG has been warning for a long time that this would be the denouement. Gold bugs often prattle about the dollar's demise — condign punishment for a country that has amassed $3 trillion of net liabilities abroad, slashed its savings rate below zero and spent itself into a debtor's gaol — but they rarely ask what currency it is supposed to collapse against.
China is a leveraged play on US shopping malls. Japan is already buckling. Its economy contracted 0.3pc in Q2. Wages have fallen for eight months in a row. The Abe government has fallen — the first sub-prime victim, but not the last.
Until now, the euro has served as the "anti-dollar", the default choice for Asians and petrodollar powers wary of US assets. This cannot last.
A rate of $1.43 (it was 83 cents in 2000) will combine, after a one-year lag, with deflating property bubbles in the Club Med bloc to cause a crisis in 2008. It will then become clear that the needs of the Germanic and Latin zones are incompatible and that a coin with no treasury, debt union, or polity to back it up cannot displace the dollar — if it survives at all.
Airbus is already underwater, unable to meet its dollar contracts unless it shifts plant from Europe. Every 10-cent rise in the euro costs €1bn.
