One of the few upsides that I can find at a very selfish level in the Bush win is that as Bush’s fiscal insanity continues to destroy the US economy (while he pretends to be a “fiscal conservative”) the rest of the world is noticing and consequently the US dollar is dropping.
Even though I work for an American company, my salary is fixed in Canadian dollars, so currency fluctuation does not affect how much my pay cheque is each week.
However, many of the items I buy are priced in US dollars, with the Canadian price being a straight conversion from the US one. The prime example here is “books”, which is also pretty much the biggest monthly expense around here.
As the US dollar weakens against the Canadian, my purchasing power with respect to items with prices fixed in US dollars increases.
In other words, with the Canadian dollar at it’s highest in over a decade against the US dollar today, I can buy more books for the same amount of money.
Here’s a little graph (click for larger version) I’ve annotated of US dollar versus Canadian dollar for the last 15 years or so. The blue section is the Clinton administration (note the trend in there), while the red section is the Bush regime (note the completely different trend there).
The downside is that my currency winfall on my stock options disappears as the US dollar falls, but since the US economy seems headed for a crash anyway I’m not pinning much hope on those options anyway.
By the way, I know that a relatively high Canadian dollar is bad for both our export and tourism industries. I don’t care. We should be less dependant on the US market, and if a relatively high dollar loses us some easy sales in the US, and consequently forces us to develop other markets (Hello Europe!) then that’s a good thing in the long term. I am very tired of us kowtowing to the US immigration policy, for example, because Bush keeps threatening to close or slow the border–which would affect something like 87% of our exports.
updated: Here’s a link to a little backgrounder on the currency question with some very simple macroeconomics definitions snuck in. You can also see Paul Krugman’s encyclopedia entry on exchange rates or, if you are really enthused, you can read Krugman’s PhD thesis: An Essay On Flexible Exchange Rates.
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