Hey Texrat,

Nokia makes lots of money overseas... does that mean your stock is likely to go up if the dollar is worth less?

Sorry to everyone else (in the US), just looking for silver linings ;-)

No because overseas markets are also crashing. For the short term, people in many countries will buy less, making everyone poorer. What is happening now appears to be: The US economy is pulling down those of other countries. Their problems are making the US economy worse. Which makes the US economy pull down those of other countries. Continue forever. This is the dynamics of recession. Of course, "continue forever" is an overgeneralization, but you do get a kind of down-spiral.

That is true, the effects over here in good ol' europe are similar. And that is another fundamental problem in all this:
As I bank, I have two possible strategies in general:
a) be very risky ans make lots of money as long as everything is well
b) be conservative and have slightly lower profits
If bank a) crashes, the tax payer has to take care of it (as the effect on overall economy would be too catastrophic if a big bank crashes), so why should I be bank b)?
Same with states. Countries that have very weak rules regarding financial safety (as the US do) push their economy, countries that have a more conservative, safe approach don't. When the s**t hits the fan, the safe countries have to pay too, so why should they be conservative?
All in all, the system favors speculation. That won't change in the future.

"All in all, the system favors speculation. That won't change in the future."

It won't change, exactly, but it might become less popular. I'm not sure that speculation is an entirely bad thing.

In fact, speculation reminds me of wildfires here in Southern California. We have giant fires, and it often turns out that they were caused by kids playing with matches, or unattended campfires. Gotta do something about that!

But the fact is, forests that are filled with tinder are just waiting for something to start a fire, and the fault would not be fixed by preventing such accidents -- doing that just makes the next fire bigger. In fact, encouraging fires is not a bad idea, to burn up that tinder.

Similarly, speculation is caused by systemic weaknesses and people trying to take advantage of them. The solution is to stop the problem from getting that bad to begin with. Somehow...

I'm thinkin' because the US acted first to attempt to add liquidity to the credit markets, the value of the dollar may actually soon go up!

I wish, but I highly doubt it.