Dollar Takes A Beating
Posted on: Dec 9th, 2008 | By Doug Casey | Filed under Financial News
In the currency market, the dollar took a pounding from the euro. Late Monday, the euro was trading at $1.2943 vs. $1.2696 on Friday.
The currency market activity was “all Obama-related,” said Simon Derrick, of the Bank of New York Mellon (NYSE:BK). “It really is down to talk about a bailout package for the auto industry and by and large ignoring the scale of fiscal deficits.”
The President-elect said that the auto industry is the “backbone” of American manufacturing. As millions of Americans rely on the Big Three for their jobs, directly or indirectly, the companies should not be consigned to court-supervised bankruptcy, Obama said.
In addition, Obama said he will focus his economic recovery strategy on making the biggest investment in the nation’s infrastructure since President Eisenhower created the interstate highway system a half- century ago.
Employing vintage New Deal rhetoric, Obama said state governors have many such projects that are “shovel ready,” meaning they could be undertaken swiftly and have an immediate impact on jobs.
The January president refrained from putting a price tag on his stimulus package, saying only that his advisers are “busy working, crunching the numbers, looking at the macroeconomic data to make a determination as to what the size and the scope of the economic recovery plan needs to be. But it is going to be substantial.”
And he said that even with a federal budget shortfall threatening to run to $1 trillion, “we can’t worry, short term, about the deficit … We’ve got to make sure that the economic stimulus plan is large enough to get the economy moving.”
Source: Dollar Takes A Beating
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