Can the Dollar Drop Fast Enough to Keep the Markets Up?

10-14-2010 • ZeroHedge.com

Only 12M Americans, not even 10% of our workforce, now work in Manufacturing so EVEN IF a 10% decline in the dollar boosted manufacturing by 10% and EVEN IF making 10% more stuff got US Corporations to hire 10% more staff - that would add just 1.2M workers. That’s not very likely when FoxConn is happy to ramp up with workers who make less money per day than a US worker pays for lunch at a roach coach… IMPORTS, on the other hand, were up 2.1% to $200.2Bn. That is a net deficit of $46.4Bn or a pace of well over $500Bn a year that we ship overseas. Adding insult to injury, we bought a lot less stuff this month - we just got charged more for it as our dollar depreciated. Getting less for more is something the middle class has gotten used to this decade and, as we’ve pointed out before - food inflation does not even take into account the shrinking size of almost everything you buy at the grocery store, yet another way we get less for more as our economy collapses in stealth mode. Well, not entirely stealthy as 462,000 pink slips were handed out last week to US workers which was 20,000 more than expected so that’s knocking our futures back down a bit, as is the 0.4% increase in September Producers’ Prices (what inflation, right) which is 300% more than the 0.1% predicted by the same idiots who tell us how great the economy is and how we shouldn’t worry about inflation and how Quantitative Easing is a clever policy… I will say this again. Devaluing the dollar by 12.5% costs US Citizens $3.75Tn of their Dollar-denominated assets in the past 5 months and even if we did hire 1.2M factory workers because it boosted exports (it didn’t and we didn’t), that would still be costing us over $3M per job! That’s a pretty hefty cost to pay to make sure the government doesn’t waste any money on additional stimulus, isn’t it? The top 1% don’t care because they are hedging with commodities but the bottom 99% are getting raped repeatedly at the rate of 2.5% of their wealth removed each month, just to maintain unemployment at the current crisis levels. This is, as the Joker and I mentioned on Monday, a horrifying plan!