El Opinador Compulsivo

Señores, el dólar se desploma, la economía de EEUU se cae a pedazos, para alegría de la progresía internacional. Lo dijo hasta Chávez, debe ser verdad. A invertir en bolívares y riales iraníes.

Pero hete aquí que pareciera que no es tan así la cosa:

Much has been written about the eschatological symbolism of the dollar's fall and the financial problems that have accompanied it. The apparent consensus among commentators here in America and especially in Europe is that the US has become a kind of Third World country, awash in debt and sinking fast because of a collapsing housing market and a banking system in meltdown. And all this is supposed to reflect in turn a seismic shift in the balance of global economic power away from the US and towards Mighty Europe and Emerging Asia.

Let me take a moment in this season of cheer to raise a few objections. The first and most obvious point is that there are many reasons why currencies move against each other, often in quite dramatic fashion. Seismic, epochal, geopolitical shifts are not usually the best explanation.

Rather, more prosaic facts such as differentials in countries' short-term interest rates, the rebalancing of temporary financial and economic imbalances and sudden changes in demand for and prices of commodities such as oil produced by particular countries — all of these help explain the dollar's recent decline.