Playing with fire

摘要

Prudentbear. com, a website that attracts the Jeremiahs of financial markets, carried a bleak commentary on the dollar on May 11th, laced with foreboding about American trade data, due the next day. "Can there be any doubt that the nation's record current-account and trade deficits have begun to take a serious and growing toll on the dollar? I think not." The writer, an American financial consultant named Douglas Gillespie, went on: "I remind readers that the stockmarket crash in October 1987 began months earlier as a dollar problem, that then became an interest-rate problem, that then became a stockmarket problem—a very, very big stockmarket problem!"