"It could all be a different story if the dollar does fall through the floor. But it's all a big if at the moment."

Surely that's a *when*, not *if*. They have no assets backing the dollar, only US Government debt. They're running a huge trade deficit, which requires dollars be printed to cover the external debts. The dollar gets dilluted. The money supply number increases so your debtors know the dollars they hold are being dilluted. M3 being the key one, since it shows the dollars going abroad to pay external debt.

So lets look at the US M3 money supply number.... oops can't, they stopped releasing that number in 2006 after it spiked. It gave US creditors the willies to think they might be holding bits of overprice toilet paper, so the best Rovian plan was to conceal the bad news.

To me, that's a big warning sign, when the best course of action is to start hiding the numbers, it's akin to not opening the threatening letters from the credit card company.

I see Bush & co's strategy of capturing oil assets and putting them under US oil companies control. But the cost in US$ alone is so high it would have been cheaper to just buy the damn oil.

There's no way USA can afford the short term cash to invade Iran (or even Venezuela) offset against a long term gain of having that as a dollar asset. Yet from the desperate rhetoric coming from the Whitehouse, it looks like that's the only strategy they have to fix this.

If they did invade, they'd have to print dollars like crazy (crash).

If they don't invade, they have to cut expenditure to balance the books (crash).

*When*, not *if*.

Pretty amazing to see how one President can turn a whole country around and drive it into the ground in as little as 8 years. Bush really is the worst President ever.

Well, I think that article tells us that Angel of Ovum IT needs to practise more. He must be of the Burning Bush School of Thought.

"If it continues we could find some bigger players such as IBM and EMC being hit by the downturn... the markets are volatile but it's hard to predict what's going to happen." Punished because they should have seen IT coming? Or punished because they didn't buy in the right Technology? Or is that further refined to be Methodology/Algorithm?

"It's like a battle going on next door. The odd refugee may wander across, but this is a civil war rather than empire building." Unless something pretty radical is done, the building is bound to collapse being as there may be so may as yet hidden explosive charges..... and boy, does that imitate 911 Conspiracy theorisms or not?

And empire builders learnt empires ago that empire building was not the way to go but it is only recently that IT has enabled IT to spread the word ....... http://jamesstgeorge.proboards32.com/index.cgi?board=Worldissues&action=display&thread=1188155720&page=1#1188199174

..... to those who can read and write/look and listen.