The Dollar ... Gold and a good rant

I get all sorts of messages in my email box every day. Among the ominous gloom and doom messages are those about the coming dollar collapse. Now I'll be the first one to say that I'm not sure what is going on, or what the tea leaves hold for the future. I do think that irresponsibility breeds more irresponsibility and that I've never seen so much financial irresponsibility in my lifetime as the cavalier way the government has been acting in the past few months and to some extent in the past few years.

Here's a look at gold and the U.S. dollar which essentially shows the value of the dollar sharply falling and the value of gold, denominated in dollars, rising steadily. The short story is that your money is becoming less valuable. The longer story is a question: Where do we go from here? If irresponsibility continues to be the order of the day, then the likelihood is that we see this story continuing and maybe even getting worse. How much worse? Hard to say. I'd say it's between the devil and the deep blue sea, between inflation a'la the Carter years, or something a good deal worse because a trillion here and a trillion there pretty soon you've beggared not only your children but your grandchildren and your great grandchildren. Somewhere along the way the Chinese say we won't take any more American IOUs and maybe the rest of the world says the American dollar isn't stable enough to be a good reserve currency and then we have a run on the dollar. That could lead to much worse inflation than the Carter years.

But (standard disclaimor follows) What the hell do I know? I'm just a physicist and all the banker, financial analyst, talking heads etc. are saying conflicting things. I just know that you can't really make money by just printing it. You have to do something tangible and useful. Hello, is anyone out there doing that? Take off your damn earphones and stop twittering for a minute. You have to do something useful!!