From last Sunday’s Washington Times (of all places) via News Dissector and Prensa Latina:
COLLEGE STATION, Texas — The Bush administration has adopted a new counterintelligence strategy that calls for “attacking” foreign spy services and the spy components of terrorist groups before they can strike, a senior U.S. intelligence official said yesterday.
National [...]
It looks like the dollar may lose its reserve currency status even sooner than expected. The process seems to have already started:
The Guardian - Central banks are moving out of dollars and into euros, a shift that will make it harder for the US to finance its huge current account deficit, it [...]
Good news and yet bad news for Cuba. What are the odds of Cuba being able to protect their newly discovered oil reserves from their oil hungry neighbour? They have about as much chance as East Timor has of recovering its oil reserves from Australia. No wonder Cuba have been conducting military exercises. [...]
More under-reported significant news from Ray McGovern at Tom Paine:
The most striking result of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov’s four-day visit to China this week was the agreement announced Monday to hold “substantial military exercises on Chinese territory in 2005″ (quote from Russia’s Interfax news agency). This was Ivanov’s second trip to Beijing this [...]
May as well make it a hat-trick of reserve currency articles. In the Guardian economics professor James K Galbraith discusses how the decline in the dollar is good for Bush’s buddies but bad for everybody else:
We have over many years worn down our trade position in the world economy, depending for our living standard [...]
(The Observer) Japan is warning the White House that there will be ‘enormous capital flight’ from the dollar if the Bush administration maintains its laissez-faire approach to the mounting currency crisis.
Tokyo fears that Japan’s strongest economic recovery in a decade could be derailed by the sudden appreciation in the yen against the greenback.
The criticism of [...]
Now that The Economist has called attention to this potential disaster perhaps it will start getting the media attention it warrants:
THE dollar has been the leading international currency for as long as most people can remember. But its dominant role can no longer be taken for granted. If America keeps on spending and borrowing at [...]
