19 Years Providing Weekly Foresight

 

The most accurate predictive report on technology and the global economy,

read by leaders in industry, finance, and government worldwide.

 

 

 

 

In This Issue     Feature: Currency Wars II: The Isolated Dollar   The Game The Media Currency Wars Honesty vs. Wealth Additional Dollar Drivers Is a Strong Dollar Good or Bad? The Domestic Economics and Equity Markets What Can Go Wrong Summary   Quotes of the Week   Takeout Window The US Dollar: Last Man Standing, or the Only Honest Player?   Upgrades and Numbers The Russians Out the NSA Turning Insects into Cyborg Drones   Ethermail   Inside SNS   Upcoming SNS Events   Where's Mark?

[Please open the attached .pdf for best viewing.]

 

 

Recommended Reading:

 

Neutrino Hunters: The Thrilling Chase for a Ghostly Particle to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe, by Ray Jayawardhana (Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)

 

For the physicists (and scientists, and engineers, and nerds - ) in our group, this is a great read on the most mysterious particles in the zoo. Forget the Higgs, which was a field more than a particle; these are the real ghosts in the machine. - mra

 

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Currency Wars II: The Isolated Dollar

 

The Game

 

You're playing poker. It's quite late in the evening, the room is full of smoke, and your 19 fellow players are starting to fade. It's about time: almost all of the money is in their piles, not yours.

 

It wasn't supposed to end this way. Although everyone started out the night with different amounts of cash, it's a gentleman's game - or, at least, that's what you thought earlier in the evening - and anything could happen. Then, it does.

 

On a trip to the restroom, you find a chip on the floor and realize it has fallen from a shelf in the hall. A box on that shelf is stuffed with more chips, just sitting there: hundreds of chips in 10, 100, even 1,000-dollar denominations. You close the box, leave the first chip on the floor, and go back to the table.

 

Over the next few hours, you notice your friends taking restroom trips more and more often. Even though they've had losing hands, their funds have been increasing; they have to be taking chips from the hall. Everyone, it seems, is doing it. OK, you took a few, too, but then it just seemed too - well, too sleazy. So you stopped.

 

Now the night's over, and for whatever reasons, their piles are larger than ever - much larger than yours.

 

Welcome to the modern G20 game called  "international trade."