Demise of the Dollar?

On today's radio program, Glenn Beck put recent economic news into perspective...

Back in the 1970s we decided… “We don't have to build anything. We'll be the world's consumer…We'll be the bankers of the world.”

Being the bankers of the world doesn't work out when you're in a…society [where]… you have to define the word "Is”…Nobody wants that banker…

There's plenty of smarts in America. There are not enough people with credibility and honesty and integrity, somebody that understands ethics. So we became the world's banker with no ethics. And then about four years ago we went over to China and we lectured China and the rest of the world, "You've got to adopt our system. You just don't know what you're doing." And we lectured them on how to do finances. How's that working out for you? So now the rest of the world is saying, wait a minute, okay, they lied to us when they said they would be on the gold standard and then Nixon convinced them, no, no, no, we'll be the consumer…And so we got off the gold standard and we said, "But we'll never trash the dollar" because it affects them. So what happened? We trashed the dollar. But as we were trashing the dollar we said, yeah, but the rest of the world will need us because we're the world's financial center. And then we trashed that image. So now our dollar is falling because we're borrowing too much money. See, the dollar bill, if you have one in your pocket, pull it out. Look at it. That's a stock certificate. That's what that is. Think of it as a stock certificate. It's a share, a $1 share in America. Well, just like any other company, when the company's health starts to look bad, people sell their shares. That's what China is doing by spending it. They were holding it, but they no longer think it's going to have a long term growth…

We used to be GM, 1940. We're now GM 2009. People don't want their stock anymore. But because they hold so much of it, they don't want to just dump it. Because if somebody dumps it, then everybody is selling, and you can't get it sold. If somebody like China comes in and just tries to dump all of their stock or if somebody who holds a huge amount of our stock, our shares, our money, our dollars and they just go into the open market and they dump it quickly, the price would just cave because there would be too much. It works just like the stock market and so your dollar loses value. Already in the last [seven years*] by what we have done to our country… every single dollar you hold has lost 20 to 30 cents…And it hasn't even begun yet…

Right now we're blowing blue smoke all across the highway. Our engine is about to fail. The question is, does America pull herself off to the side of the road, take the engine out and redo it, or do we just keep driving and maybe end up in the middle of absolutely nowhere where we are miles away from any kind of tools?

I think we all know the answer to that.

Note: *The radio transcript says, "six months," but on his TV show, Beck said, "seven years." I think the latter is correct.