The End Of The American Dream
The Refined and Intellectual EU vision
EU Expansion and Multiculturalism
17 June 2010
Note: This article tears apart the American personality in ways many readers will find offensive. It is designed to appeal to traders unconcerned with niceties, and who instead look for macro trends. It is also designed to appeal to intellectual Europeans looking for philosophical vision in the EU governance. These readers will find the long analysis of America helpful, because it puts them in the right frame of mind before Europe's future is discussed toward the end of the article. I strongly suggest Americans don't read it, unless they are master of universe types who already despise American values!
Sometimes in life we have hunches so strong they are almost premonitions. I remember one back in April 2000, I was trading S&P500 Index Futures at the time. That morning, as I was looking out of the window on the way to work, it hit me :- the market is going down today.
By about lunch time I was 100 big figures onside, it was an enormous one day move and a lot of money. A guy I worked with said "For Gods sake take it you fool!", and thank God I did, because it rallied back to end the day almost unchanged. I went home richer, but also in shock. Sometimes blow out days at the end of a move are a sign of exhaustion and a turn, but the market had been going up not down. Eventually I figured this price action reflected a market pumped up with hot air, my hunch was still spot on, and I shorted twice as much as before. Sure enough, within a few days it started falling again, it was the beginning of the dot com bust.
It was one of my greatest trades, but what made it possible was a remarkable vision that had come to me early that year. In the vision I saw the sun, at its precise zenith, shining over America in all its radiant glory, marking the peak of a great golden age, and then beginning to slowly drop. I was inspired, and became hooked on the idea of American decline.
Eventually I expressed that American decline theme primarily in bearish dollar positions, eg long EURUSD, short USDCAD, long AUDUSD. Today one might add bearish bets on 30 year US government bonds. American decline does not mean the price of the S&P500 necessarily goes down, both because dollar decline can help the stock market and because US multinationals are benefiting from strong growth in Asia.
The dot com crash and the election of George Bush were not the only events to increase my sense of foreboding. As a teenager I had idealised America, and New York in particular. By 2001 I was living there and my admiration was rapidly unravelling. I hadn't realised, before moving to the USA, the blindness, the shallowness, bedevilling American personality. The Ancient Greeks said "Know Thyself" because it is the key to wisdom, but to do that you have to value truth more than success, you have to be able to question yourself impartially.
On September 11th I was working just a few blocks away from the World Trade Centre, within a few days you could smell the bodies, thousands of rotting corpses sweet and sickly, then came the disinfectant. For the next few months life in New York was surreal, it was full of chaos, fear, despair and anger, but it was also a time of reflection, of perspective. I realized how much America is hated and how bad its foreign policy is. With the Anthrax scare I also realized how vulnerable it is.
Large US current account deficits had begun building up in the late 1990s, by 2000 they were pointing toward a possible dollar decline. Clinton ran budget surpluses and repaid the Regan debt, but by the time Bush was elected we realised that the dot com bubble had been masking a growing long term structural spending problem. Bush's tax cuts and wars were disastrous, today the US government has debts and deficits the scale of which we have not seen since WW2.
A week before the first Bush election in November 2000, EURUSD traded as low as 0.8231. By the time of the next Bush election, in November 2004, the Euro was up at 1.27. After that second Bush election things got much worse for the US, and the Euro rose to a high of 1.6038 in July 2008, before the credit crisis kicked in and the dollar staged a come back on 'flight to safety'.
The credit crisis marked the beginning of an extremely volatile period in EURUSD, which was fortunate for me, for now I was back in London working in high frequency foreign exchange proprietary trading, which makes more money when the market is volatile. When Lehman's blew up in September 2008 EURUSD was back at 1.25. By Dec 2008 it had rallied back to 1.47. Then it dropped suddenly back to 1.25, before rallying steadily to 1.50 in Dec 2009. Then the Greek Crisis and the Eurozone Crisis kicked in, and it headed down again, touching 1.18 recently.
The point of this article is to reflect on the American position today, and try to guess where EURUSD is headed now. After all that vision of mine is ten years old now, does it still count? The prevailing view is that America is not riding high, we now see the future as China, but it is at least in better shape than Europe. I have to disagree with that. Even in the last few weeks I have become more bearish on the US, because of what one could call a series of omens.
In November 2008 Obama was elected. Unlike John Kerry he didn't impress me, in this article I predicted disaster at the time of his election. Yet my pessimism is increasingly bearing bad fruit. I saw a nice article in the FT recently, Obama’s Cairo speech comes back to haunt him. The article makes the point:
In his first interview after moving into the Oval Office last year,
Barack Obama told al-Arabiya, the Gulf channel, that “ultimately people are
going to judge me not by my words but by my actions”. Yet nowhere is the
divergence between what Mr Obama wants, and what he has achieved, greater than
in the Middle East.
A year ago on Thursday, Mr Obama electrified much of the Muslim world when he
delivered the most unorthodox speech of his presidency at Al-Azhar university in
Cairo. The address, in which he quoted the Koran three times and omitted the
words “terror” and “terrorism”, held out the promise of a “new beginning”
between the US and the Muslim world.
“The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli
settlements,” he said. “Just as it devastates Palestinian families, the
continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel’s security...
Israel must take concrete steps [to help the people of Gaza].”
It is a bitter irony that the anniversary of Mr Obama’s historic speech
coincided this week with Israel’s assault on the “peace flotilla” bringing aid
to Gaza. But opinion in the Arab world, had long since turned sour on Mr Obama’s
willingness – or ability – to deliver on what he set out in Cairo.
The article goes on:
[There is a] larger and more troubling critique of Mr Obama’s way of
doing business, which can be as timid in its execution as it is bold in its
declaration. Mr Obama places great faith in his powers of persuasion. His
instinct is to synthesise opposing positions with the hope they will eventually
harmonise. All of this remains a breath of fresh air after his predecessor’s
dogmatic inclinations.
Yet when reason alone fails, as anyone with experience of dealing with Mr
Netanyahu could have forecast, Mr Obama is often left floundering. Sixteen
months after launching a bold bid to create a two-state solution, Mr Obama is
mired in an essentially irrelevant round of “proximity talks” led by George
Mitchell, his regional envoy. In the space of a year Mr Obama’s biggest foreign
policy goal has been reduced from Olympus to Lilliput.
This critique is not new. During the campaign, Mr Obama was accused of raising
expectations beyond his capacity to meet them. He promised a transformative
presidency. But he has so far stuck to a conventional textbook. One of the
biggest applause lines in the Cairo speech came when Mr Obama promised an end to
George W. Bush’s detention policies.
“I have ordered the prison at Guantánamo Bay closed by early next year,” he
said. Six months after that deadline expired, hundreds of detainees remain
onsite. In retrospect that pledge is even more puzzling since it was already
apparent last June that Mr Obama would be unable to close Guantánamo in time.
Yet for some reason – the need for applause? – he could not resist repeating it.
“The speech was probably Obama’s finest hour in terms of transformational
foreign policy,” says David Rothkopf, a former official of Bill Clinton and
supporter of Mr Obama. “His failure to live up to its promise is probably the
best illustration of the broader problems his presidency is facing.”
Whether it is Mr Obama’s inability to close Guantánamo, his decision to triple
US troop levels in Afghanistan, or his muted response to the flotilla fiasco,
people fear Mr Obama represents continuity more than change.
“There may be a worry that Obama is that classic American product,” Mr Rothkopf
adds. “The same old thing in a package marked ‘new and improved’.”
He hits the nail on the head. Now take a look at BP. Sure BP made mistakes, and underplayed the size of the problem initially. Yet Obama's 20 billion dollar fund for compensation (not including cleanup costs) is as outrageous as making BP pay compensation for the drilling ban. No other country would dare to impose such a penalty, especially if the company in question was a large S&P500 member.
Look at Dow Chemical in Bhopal. Warren Anderson, Chairman and CEO of Union Carbide, escaped the country whilst on bail, he jumped into a US government plane, headed home, and his government subsequently refused to extradite him to India. After years and years a derisory level of compensation was paid - less than half a billion dollars. The US oil leak is bad but so is the death of 25,000 people (plus 500,000 injured). How many died for the 2,500 US deaths in Sep 11? It doesn't stop there, witness the Exxon Valdez spill, the Amoco Cadiz spill. From wikiepedia:
Amoco Cadiz was a very large crude carrier, owned by Amoco, that split in
two after running aground on Portsall Rocks, 5 km from the coast of Brittany,
France, on 16 March 1978, resulting in the largest oil spill of its kind in
history to that date. Its entire cargo of crude oil spilled into the sea.
Oil penetrated the sand on several beaches to a depth of 5cm. Piers and slips in the small harbors from Porspoder to Brehat Island were covered with oil. Other affected
areas included the pink granite rock beaches of Trégastel and Perros-Guirec, as
well as the tourist beaches at Plougasnou. The total extent of oiling one month
after the spill included approximately 320 km of coastline.
At the time, the Amoco Cadiz incident resulted in the largest loss of marine life ever recorded from an oil spill. Two weeks following the accident, millions of dead mollusks, sea urchins, and other bottom dwelling organisms washed ashore. Diving birds constituted the majority of the nearly 20,000 dead birds that were recovered [by contrast less than 500 dead oiled birds have been recovered so far in the Gulf Spill]. Fishermen in the area caught many fish with skin ulcerations, tumors, and a strong taste of petroleum.
Erosion of beaches occurred in several places. Evidence of oiled beach sediments can still be seen in some of the affected marshes, mudflats, and sandy beaches. Layers of sub-surface oil still remain buried in many of the impacted beaches.
The French Navy was responsible for all offshore operations while the French Civil Safety Service was responsible for shore cleanup activities.
The French government later presented claims totalling US$2 billion to United States courts.... In 1990, twelve years after the spill, at legal proceedings in Chicago, United States, France was awarded US$120 million from the American oil company Amoco.
Already the world of international blog is filled with accusations of "American Hypocrisy". Here is an example:
Firstly I have to state I'm pretty much pro America I think the Yanks are a force for good on this rock, however when I see Obama landing in Florida for the second time to see the damage done by BPs oil spill I have to ask is it necessary to fly in in a sodding great big 747, to fly in 1 man to assess the damage he will already have been fully briefed on, damage caused by a rig staffed by Americans run by Americans regulated by Americans built to fill the American "gas" tanks on their sodding great big 5+ litre engined American cars?
Here is one of the replies:
Why don't you "typical" limey mother ######s kiss our "typical arrogant American" asses then?! When are you people going to wake up and understand we're the only real friends you have? Oh wait a minute, I forgot about the French, the Spanish and the Belgians. I guess you can always count on Germany and Italy too. I'm about to the point that I would just as soon bow out and not give a damn if the Muslims or Fascists or Communists or whatever the flavor of the month is divide you all up however they see fit. Oh and good luck with that Euro thing too. It just keeps getting stronger every day, doesn't it? Believe me, most Americans would like nothing better than to totally distance ourselves from all things European. But sooner or later there will be another earthquake or tsunami or war or terror attack and we "typicallly arrogant Americans" will undoubtably come right back again to help. How freakin stupid are we anyway?!!! And we're terribly sorry about the Obama thing. We genuinely thought you "elitist Liberal Europeans" would love this guy as much as you did Clinton. I tell you what, next time we'll just concede and let you guys elect our President. Good luck Europe, we sincerely hope you get what you all deserve.
A marvellous example of American Self Analysis! I especially love way things European include terror attacks and tsunamis!
Yet the main point I am trying to make here is that these examples of dreadful policymaking are signs of America's psychological/political breakdown. Also, time is speeding up, similar examples appear to be coming think and fast these days. Eg: failure of heath care, failure of climate change, the tea party rise, the increasing sense of failure in Afghanistan, the Toyota shakedown, the signs that US growth is turning down again and the US housing market woes are not over.
In 2010 the sense of political failure in the USA has definitely intensified. We now know Bush was not a one off, Obama is another populist looser, American politics looks unfixable. Commentators talk about the appalling gridlock infecting US Politics, the power split between President, Congress, Senate is making it impossible to get anything done. Amazingly, this point is completely lost on many Americans, who think the problem is that their politicians have too much, not too little, power. This irrationality brings us to another vital dynamic of today's American politics - anger and insanity.
The American 'success over truth' psychology breaks down into angry zealotry when naïve assumptions unravel. Look back at the American Civil War, by the 1860s the American masses had turned politics into a religion, party loyalty was passed from fathers to sons, and party activities, including spectacular campaign events, complete with uniformed marching groups and torchlight parades, mesmerised communities. Like fire and brimstone preachers, politicians whipped up the people, and the country was torn apart. Increasingly we see echoes of this insanity in America politics today. The emotional attachment to ideology that comes out of the need for success is the essence of this passionate irrationality problem. Because the driver is perceived personal success, it is also a famously hypocritical and shallow form of irrationality.
I have been talking about America's psycho-political breakdown. More specifically America is falling apart under democracy, it is degenerating into an increasingly unbridled and selfish society. Chastised by the Eurozone sovereign debit cists, the Europeans are now beginning to dig in, to humbly prepare for hard times ahead. In America digging in is politically impossible, more wood must be added to the fire, but what if it fails? Sure, you can argue that in short term the growth outlook for the US looks better if the American's are prepared to monetize debt and the Europeans are not. But what are the implications for the dollar? What are the longer term consequences? What will the Tea Party supporting masses do when the hangover can not be suppressed any longer?
The American success over truth psychology impacts aesthetics. Asked to imagine a painter one typically visualises a Paul Gauguin like character, a beret wearing unwashed pessimist, someone who has cast off all the rules of society in his search for truth. The American personality comes in two flavours, saccharin positivism and gung ho arrogance, both are antithetical to aesthetics. Sure there are American rebels, but even they have a positive side, compare rocking and rolling Bruce Springsteen with the apathetic Sex Pistols. Dean & DeLuca was pretty much the only shop in New York selling fresh cream - I could hardly get my head around the idea that the most sophisticated city in the USA lives on UHT cream. Did you know there are three markets for clothes irons in the world? The Japanese don't care much about aesthetics they primarily want gadgets, such as an LCD plate temperature display, it's the geek market. The Europeans want style and functionality, in a sense it is the most developed market. The Americans like $9.99 old fashioned industrial design, they represent the cheapest and least sophisticated market segment.
The American success over truth psychology also rules out the intellectual life. This is the nation that made Titanic, a revoltingly sentimental and monumentally stupid film without any merit whatsoever. It also made King Kong, the appalling modern movie in which we shake with excitement as countless humans die, before crying when the fatally wounded gorilla sheds a tear. In Bat Man the Dark Knight we have ethical dilemmas so utterly trivial they can only appeal to the pathological ideologist incapable of pragmatic intelligence. No wonder Orthodox Jews love New York, where else would refusing to push buttons on Friday not label one a complete idiot? Indeed, the American masses as a whole openly despise intellectuals and extol the virtues of ideology, the European masses are far more enlightened.
The American success over truth psychology also despises the sort of cosmopolitan progress we see in Europe - and realizing this is the key eye opener to American decline. I am always amazed at the transformation of Greece. No so long ago Greece was a country full of peasants, yet young Greek people today are completely different, they are properly refined and intellectual Europeans. It's not just the Greeks, the people of Europe have been transforming themselves in the last few years. Remember the food in London 20 years ago? I was talking to a Russian friend recently who was saying how remarkable it is that only a few years ago America inspired Russians, but these days Russians just laugh at American stupidity. Something absolutely extraordinary has occurred in Europe, an evolution, a flourishing, a new sophistication. Meanwhile, America, which once inspired this evolutionary process, is going nowhere, and is increasingly despised and belittled by Europeans. Examples of America parochialism include the all green money, the one dollar bill, use of inches, lack of heath care etc. Once you really grasp this point, which is the essence the two preceding points have in common, the decline of America really sinks in.
What about American positives compared to Europe? The United States comes 178 out of 240 in a list of countries by population density, that's lower than any EU member except Sweden. The UK is 51st, Germany 55th, Italy 60th, even France is only 96th. On summer weekends I could go canoeing in the Adirondacks, on winter weekends I could go skiing in Vermont. With a large population, a massive country, lots of natural resources and low property prices America is still a cheap place to live. Out of that comes economic power and contentment. My father's sister is married to an Englishman who spent many years living in the US. He was a senior executive in BP, he had an enormous house in the suburbs and a few enormous cars. Every year trucks would arrive and plant him a whole new garden. His six year old daughter had a pink CD player, at a time when CD players were still rare in England. He didn't take a train to work, he drove his air conditioned limo on the freeway. He lived a completely different life in the US, a life that would have been unaffordable in the UK.
Although the economies of scale, low population density and natural resources result in an American standard of living higher than in Europe today, it is an increasingly unsustainable model in both economic and environmental terms. The consumer goods on which America thrives are increasingly made in China, and the oil mostly comes from abroad, the resource rich arguments are drying up. Now Europe has 500 million people in a loose common market, China has 1.3 billion in a full single market, the economies of scale are no longer game changing. America's single great remaining advantage is potentially cheap property prices coming out of low population density. The great threat to American is its reliance on imports, when the dollar falls life in the US will get much harder. Also, politics is finally catching up with America, medical care is going through the roof, unions are killing American industry.
The basic point is that life was easy when population densities were low, Government was easy, but the challenges ahead are of another order altogether. The Americans haven't woken up to the new reality at all. Perhaps the founders of the American constitution designed political gridlock into the system because in those days we didn't need government, but unfortunately we certainly do now. Gridlock, which prevents government intervention, was one of the keys to America's past success, today it is one of the keys to disaster.
Because America political gridlock is unable to respond to today's challenges, it will eventually collapse under the weight of popular pressure. This is what occurred in the run up to the Civil War as industrialization put pressure on the Southern Economies. When the establishment loose their vanishing economic credibility, gridlock will be ripped away by populism, democracy will be fully unleashed, and America will go insane. Bush, the Christian Fundamentalist, and Obama, the Afro America Rhetorician, are the beginning of the end. Soon the forces of hell shall be unleashed, and The Tea Party will march the blinkered Americans towards a new Battle of Gettysburg.
Policy making in the EU is far from perfect, but it does have Germany - a seriously enviable county. As a classical musical fan I am always amazed that Germany and Austria managed between them to produce the worlds three greatest composers: Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. It's not just Classical music, Germany also produced Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. Germany also boasts the greatest Modern Physicist: Albert Einstein. And of course there is the greatest modern car... Err, is it the Beetle, the Mercedes SL, or the Porsche 911? :-)
Many people are talking about the idea of a G2 consisting of America and China, the two largest nations by GDP. Yet they are hardly naturally allies ideologically, and America can not resist selling weapons to Taiwan and criticising China on many issues. Despite having by far the largest military in the World, the Americans publicly fret and harass China about rising military power. I can not see China and America as allies, the Americans are far too blinkered and self interested to treat allies with respect, especially ones that are eclipsing them.
By contrast, before the Second World War China and Germany were allies. Cooperation between China and Germany began in the late 19th Century and peaked in the 1930s. The Chinese urgency to modernize its industry, coupled with Germany's need for a stable supply of raw materials, brought the countries together. Although very intense cooperation lasted for only a short period of time, it had a profound effect on Chinese modernization and the capability of the Chinese to resist the Japanese in the war. Even today the impact of that era of Sino-German cooperation is softly felt in China today.
China and Germany also share a similar psychological outlook. Both countries are heavy manufacturers, run disciplined policy, are interventionist in the economy, and have a history of authoritarianism. Whereas the USA is one of the most individualist countries in the world, Germany and China are amongst the most collective (So why didn't Germany embrace Communism? Because the Teutonic personality mixes collectivism with the Nietzschean notion of the Superman. Marx was a German, but his philosophy was too proletarian for the aristocratic Germans, indeed the Germans are the disciplined intellectuals who naturally despise socialism and democracy). Looking far into the future, the USA can not compete with China, but Germany can.
So I see a world developing in which China and Germany are the leading powers. The Eurozone crisis is an opportunity for China, it allows it to invest its foreign exchange reserves outside the USA. With France, a country that has not managed to balance its budget in three decades now, declining precipitously in influence, Germany will lead Europe alone. When it does Europe should be transformed. Even Italy has vast potential, once democracy is broken.
There is one key missing. Angela Merkel is a stumbling block, her cautious humble introversion is no longer appropriate. Germany needs to rediscover herself, to feel the Ode to Joy running through her veins, to find her new Otto von Bismarck. Intellectuals around the world are beginning to see how destructive democracy is, soon German politics will be itching to forge a new path. China's example will inspire them, and the world will be transformed. When Germany politicians embrace Nuclear Power, either by ignoring their stupid voters, or making them intelligent through control of the press, you know Germany is on the path to greatenss.
What should a new Otto von Bismarck be doing? Germany needs to start stretching her legs in Europe, building a pan European economic policy unit that studies member states and makes recommendations, reducing the inefficiency of democracy. Imposing policy on near bankrupt EU member states in return for aid is another possible transformative step. Europe can emulate the empiricism and experimentation that underpins China's success by studying competing policy ideas (This need for empiricism/experimentation/competition is why I currently remain unenthusiastic towards political union. Also I worry politician union would just be chance for lazy feckless states to sponge on German prosperity. We grow by solving the challenges of life, aid is often counterproductive).
The Germans also need to begin expanding the EU. Imagine if Russia joined the Euro, who would care about banking problems in Greece if a country of that size is added? More importantly, adding emerging states and riding their expansion can bring the EU prosperity. Sure there will be increased political problems with migrant workers, but the positives outweigh the negatives. Of course Russia's lack of democracy is a barrier today, but German's new Otto von Bismarck will despise democracy, and will welcome Russia into the EU knowing it will make it easier for him to gradually move his own people away from democracy. Adding Russia to the EU will be the end of European democracy, and the beginning of European greatness.
There is another point here too. The Russians can become refined and intellectual Europeans, Russia is potentially a great country, perhaps one of greatest in the world, and it is absolutely vital to get this enormous pool of potential talent into the EU. The mistake the EU makes now is to bring in vast numbers of economic migrants from all over the world, poisoning the refined and intellectual values underlying the European dream. Remember I talked about Greek peasants becoming sophisticated Europeans - this is the vital process we need to bear in mind. Better to carefully expand the EU to worthy countries, then seal the EU borders, allowing in only the crème de la crème of the world. Junk the asylum seeking rules, who cares if an Egyptian political activist is going to be shot. If the Egyptian president was truly a rational man, he would shoot 90% of his people and introduce a two child policy, instead he is waiting for food prices to kill them slowly. The whole human rights obsession at the centre of EU decision making is absurd, throw out as many people as you can, or stop them breeding, and build a paradise not a hell.
The EU needs to bear in mind the critical factor which will allow it to survive is it's cultural, architectural and environmental advantages. If ever we see the quality of life in China beginning to eclipse Old Europe, we know the EU, and the entire Western World, is finished. Europe has to imagine itself as place of beauty and intelligence which captures the high end of economic production. It also has to build an educational and cultural system which ensures it's own people will not ruin that sophisticated vision. It's disgraceful that China now leads the world in Classical music, and China's educational system now outclasses that of Europe. The EU needs to remain the most culturally and intellectually advanced state in the world.
Germany was devastated by the War, but Munich was rebuilt and it is now a place of outstanding beauty. If I spoke German, I would happily spend my weekdays in Munich and my weekends in Saltsburg. Let the Chinese build skyscrapers, remodel Germany along traditional lines. Tear down the post modern concrete ugliness of post war Germany, and rebuild a country Mozart would approve of. Have the guts, or just the common sense to say: Objective truth exists in aesthetics just as it does in economics, Jimmy Hendrix is worse than Mozart, and modern architects are no better. Make Europe the best place in the world to live, a place of outstanding architectural beauty, a place of refined and intellectual values. Make sure that rich Chinese retire in Europe, and that Chinese intellectuals prefers to work in Munich instead of Bejing. Frankly I think the Germans should go the Singapore route and move their education system into English, as HG Wells pointed out, a utopia without a common language is an absurd idea.
The importance of capturing the world elite is far more important than people realise. As long as the English as stay out of the Eurozone, the Irish have it made. America grew by immigration, but America became a 'hyperpower' by elite immigration. It was German science that build the Atomic Bomb and the Rocket Engine. One can survive without elite immigration, and even prosper, as Finland shows. But to be the world's most powerful state you need to be the centre of elite immigration. The EU can do that, better than any other place on earth. For China the risk is that it's enormous population density and modernity stifle it's quality of life, and it consequently suffers from continuous elite emigration. Led by Otto von Bismarck the EU would give China a run for it's money, it might even become the most powerful state in the world.
Our new Otto von Bismarck would know that the goal of government is not letting it's people do what they want, or even keeping them happy and well fed, it is building a beautiful and intelligent Germany. That would be his single aim of government, to recreate the Germany of Fredrick The Great, the most enviable state since Sparta. He will know he has succeeded when composers better Mozart.
So I am arguing EURUSD goes up long term, and much of my positivism revolves around Germany. At least that is my theory, I don't know if Germany will really meet my expectations. It hasn't moved beyond the theory stage, to that point where you see it everywhere, like a gigantic jigsaw, with pieces falling into place day by day. If the writing is on the wall, one way or another, it is too subtle for me to read it yet. I am, however, sure of Americas decline relative to China. Also, I am pretty sure that the Americans will not be to the Chinese what the Greeks were to the Romans, or the British were to the Americans in the early days, rather the Americas will be utterly despised.