TITLE The economy TYPE Article PART OF COLLECTION Undoing Bush: how to repair eight years of sabotage, bungling, and neglect BY Dean Baker PUBLISHED June 2007
Two economic calamities have occurred on George W. Bush's watch. The first has been a radically overvalued dollar, which, it should be noted, is a legacy of the Clinton years: by the date of Bush's inauguration in January 2001, the real value of the dollar was already 27 percent higher than its low in July of 1995, the surge due in part to the stock bubble, in part to the financial crises in East Asia and elsewhere, and in part to high-dollar cheerleading by the Clinton Administration's treasury secretaries. And yet despite these unsustainable highs, Bush did almost nothing to reverse the run-up; the value of the dollar actually increased in 2002. It has fallen since then, but it is still 12 percent above its 1995 low. The problem that a high dollar poses for manufacturing is straightforward: if the dollar is expensive relative to other currencies, then it is very cheap for Americans to buy imported goods and very expensive for foreigners to buy U.S. exports. In effect, an overvalued dollar provides a subsidy to imports and imposes a tariff on exports. Not surprisingly, this high dollar has led to a rapidly rising trade deficit, which in 2006 grew to more than $760 billion, or nearly 6 percent of GDP. This, in turn, has been the major factor contributing to the loss since 2001 of 3 million manufacturing jobs, or more than a sixth of the entire sector. . . . http://harpers.org/archive/2007/06/0081551
