Hitchiker's guide to the industry

摘要

A sci-fi book I used to read as a child had a galactic booth that characters entered to learn their relevance to the universe. Horrified at bow insignificant they were against the vast movements of history and space, they'd become paralyzed with despair. Existential quandary aside, listening to Alan Tonelson talk about the difficulties of dollar devaluation at the Metals Service Center Institute's annual meeting last month was a little bit like that. Tonelson didn't argue the fact that when the U.S. dollar is too strong, U.S.-made products can be priced out of the market, or that various manipulations by other governments (China, Japan and South Korea for example) have kept their currencies artificially weak against the dollar, badly distorting trade patterns and creating competitive advantages in their cost structures.