Ever heard of Yekaterinburg? Me neither. It's somewhere in Russia and the last thing I read about Russia is that they really ended up with a fucked up economy with average life span of 62.3 or something younger than me and their reproduction rate is about half what it would take to replace the population and there's a lot of alcoholism.
Something has been going on with something called the dollar as the world's reserve currency that barely causes a blip in the media sphere. I have no idea how bad it is. Taplin seems to think it's pretty important, meanwhile Krugman is answering questions from readers that don't appear to recognize this topic.
Then there's the big scary:
The architects of this new global exchange realize that if they break the dollar they also break America’s military domination. Our military spending cannot be sustained without this cycle of heavy borrowing. The official U.S. defense budget for fiscal year 2008 is $623 billion, before we add on things like nuclear research. The next closest national military budget is China’s, at $65 billion, according to the Central Intelligence Agency.
...The cost of daily living, from buying food to getting medical care, will become difficult for all but a few as the dollar plunges. States and cities will see their pension funds drained and finally shut down. The government will be forced to sell off infrastructure, including roads and transport, to private corporations. We will be increasingly charged by privatized utilities—think Enron—for what was once regulated and subsidized. Commercial and private real estate will be worth less than half its current value. The negative equity that already plagues 25 percent of American homes will expand to include nearly all property owners. It will be difficult to borrow and impossible to sell real estate unless we accept massive losses. There will be block after block of empty stores and boarded-up houses. Foreclosures will be epidemic. There will be long lines at soup kitchens and many, many homeless. Our corporate-controlled media, already banal and trivial, will work overtime to anesthetize us with useless gossip, spectacles, sex, gratuitous violence, fear and tawdry junk politics. America will be composed of a large dispossessed underclass and a tiny empowered oligarchy that will run a ruthless and brutal system of neo-feudalism from secure compounds. Those who resist will be silenced, many by force. We will pay a terrible price, and we will pay this price soon, for the gross malfeasance of our power elite.
I don't know who this author is, how much of an alarmist he is, but one of Taplin's commenters linked to it and I usually respect people having that conversation.
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