Punks

Punks finished. I've been listening to Generation X (on vinyl, of course) for the last few hours while I have been working on this. Remember Blank Reg on "Max Headroom" and when the idea of old punks was science fiction?

American Decline

_disdain_ made a post earlier today about the Canadian dollar being on the "rise" against the U.S. dollar. He rightly points out that it isn't our dollar rising, but the U.S. dollar falling. The graph above uses the Euro as a baseline indicator of this: Note that the red line is relatively level - that's the what the Canadian dollar is worth in Euros, and it is a relatively stable value. The green line is the value of the U.S. dollar in Euros. Note the decline. The blue line is the value of the Canadian dollar in U.S. dollars. As the value of the U.S. dollar declines against the Euro while the Canadian dollar remains relatively steady , we see the value of the Canadian dollar approaching that of the U.S. dollar. This graph is just for the trend this year, but this is not a new trend. I looked at this a couple years ago and the value of the U.S. dollar has been dropping against world currencies steadily since - no surprise - George W. Bush was elected. For the last six years countries around the world have slowly been dropping the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency and moving to Euros.