Warning Signs on the Economy

Re “Greenspan Issues Warning on Dollar,” Nov. 20: The tea leaf readings of the “fedologists” who try to decode the nuances of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan’s turgid pronouncements disclose something that was suspiciously muted during the recent electoral campaign.

U.S. bipartisan policy over the last decade has increasingly placed our economic future in the hands of foreign powers. How ironic in view of the hyper-patriotic chest-thumping of the posturing politicians!

Gilbert Dewart

Pasadena

*

There is only one right way to cure our $600-billion trade deficit: to have better goods at lower prices than others. But, with our expensive mode of living, it is hard to have lower prices unless you can increase productivity through technology.

Our mode of living requires that we who are 5% of the world’s population must consume 25% of the world’s oil production, which means that we have to import about 60% of the oil we use.

Today, however, with machining skills now in software packages and technology spreading throughout the world, almost anything can be made anywhere.

If we lower our prices by devaluing the dollar to cure our trade deficit, that means that we are raising the prices of everything we import, including our necessary oil.

Some say devaluing the dollar is a good thing for our trade balance, but I would ask them, would you rather buy cheap or sell cheap?

Robert C. Mason

Simi Valley

*

Economists agree the day of reckoning is fast approaching! What with the falling value of the dollar against the euro and the Canadian, Japanese and Chinese currencies and the escalating trade deficit, not to mention the rising national debt, the U.S. economy is in trouble. It won’t be long before China can’t afford to invest in the U.S. because of the dropping value of the dollar. When it pulls its money out of the U.S. economy, all hell will break loose.

Interest rates will rise, the housing market will implode and the general market will collapse. George W. Bush will have finally destroyed the global economy and the U.S. government.

Sam French

Rancho Palos Verdes