economics bulletin

1.  BRITISH MOTHERS FIND PART-TIME WORK HARD TO FIND

http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm/dyn/aid/3030/context/ourdailylives

After stepping out of her career to have children and follow
her spouse abroad, Miranda Irving is having trouble finding
a suitable spot in the workplace. She and other British mothers
face a bleak part-time employment landscape.

Standing in line at a local post office, I notice an advertisement
on the wall. It reads: "Counter Clerks required. Hours to suit.
Competitive rates. Apply within."

Barely resisting the urge to correct the spelling,
I briefly consider applying. It would mean a regular-
-undoubtedly small--income and could fit around the children's
school times. But would it offer prospects for personal
development? Would my education and training go to waste?
Or should I wait for a more suitable vacancy?

It is an all-too familiar dilemma. I am a social science
graduate,trained in journalism and basic counseling with
experience of office work, writing and social research.
My career path was rosy before I married, moved overseas,
became a "trailing spouse" and mother of two.

Middle-aged and back in Britain, I want to get back to work.
I would like to use and develop the skills I once worked so
hard to gain, while earning a little income, but I do not wish
to compromise my family in the process.

A local, 9-2, part-time job would be ideal, but these are
not easy to find. Every week I scan the local papers.
The selection is poor: most part-time posts are low-skilled,
low-pay positions in call centers, supermarkets,doctors'
surgeries or school kitchens. With few alternatives, jobs like
these are in high demand in my area of Hampshire and competition
is fierce. To broaden my options, I also look on the Web for
vacancies in universities, local government or publishing,
but very few openings are part-time and even fewer fit my
background.

Over the past year, I have only found 20 suitable positions.
I target my applications carefully, selecting those for which
I am suitably experienced and which I think I stand a chance of
getting. But I have met with little success. Most recently, I
applied for a job as an exam proctor at a local school, yet
despite previous experience I was not even short listed for
interview.

I am not a great prospect for employers. With an unfinished
PhD and gaping gaps in my resume due to motherhood and six years
abroad, I seem to be a poor choice for the higher level jobs, yet
my academic achievements make me over-qualified for the rest.
I don't seem to fit anywhere and it is frustrating. After 23 years
in education--all at the expense of the British taxpayer--I want
to give something back to the economy, but what job can I do?
Who will employ me? And does it have to be at the expense of my
family?

2.  AVERAGE HOUSE PRICE IN UK TOPS £100,000

Immigration continues to drive housing costs up, which is especially
hard for young people trying to get on the property ladder.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/7609292a-a7b2-11db-b448-0000779e2340.html

Average house prices in every area of Britain have broken through the
£100,000 mark for the first time, according to the country’s largest
mortgage lender.

Halifax said the average property price in every county is now above that
mark, compared with just a third five years ago.

The news comes a week after the third rise in interest rates since last
summer, designed to stem inflationary pressures in the economy.

Experts have predicted that the latest increase in the cost of borrowing
- which took economists by surprise - will take the heat out of the
housing market. Prices jumped by 6.8 per cent in 2006, according to the
FT House Price Index, far ahead of most analysts’ expectations.

According to the Halifax, 19 counties now have an average selling price
of more than £200,000. Five years ago, this mantle only applied to
Surrey in the Home Counties.

Wales and Scotland topped the table of property price growth over the
past five years, being home to the 10 areas of most rapid growth.

This is likely to reflect the fact that more distant areas of the UK
were slow to share in the housing boom of the last decade.

Merthyr Tydfil in Wales recorded the biggest house price rise since 2001
,with the average price jumping from £45,578 to £125,450.

Southern England, by contrast - where prices leapt in the late 1990s -
saw much slower growth.

Hampshire and Wiltshire recorded the lowest average house price gains
of the past five years at 41 percent, followed by Berkshire (42 percent)
and Oxfordshire (43 percent).

Yet Surrey remains the most expensive county in the UK and Blaenau
Gwent in Wales remains the cheapest.

Estate agents remain divided over the potential impact of last week’s
interest rate rise.

Most expect central London, where many buyers do not need mortgages,
to show little impact. Brian D’Arcy Clark of Savills said the top was
still “roaring away”.

“In central London, agents aren’t working harder to sell, they are working
harder to secure instructions in the first place,” he commented.

At the same time, Lulu Egerton of Lane Fox in Chelsea said that if the
London market turned - at present it was still “full steam ahead”
- there would be little warning as sentiment could change “overnight”.

Elsewhere in the UK, the steeper cost of borrowing could give potential
buyers cause to pause, according to many observers.

Ed Mead, head of Douglas and Gordon, described the market as “difficult”.
One customer has just pulled out of a buy to let deal citing the
interest rate rise as a factor, he said.

In Shropshire, where Lane Fox have three offices, agent Mark Wiggin
said the November rate rise did quieten the market. Although he still
had a full book of applicants, vendors may have to be “more realistic”
to achieve sales.

3.  CRUCIAL CASE FOR EU LABOUR LAW

The case below has huge implications, about whether the EU will back
our government in its attempts to use cheap foreign labour as a
battering ram against our wages.   Unions can be immensely problematic
when they misbehave, but what other institution stands up for the
economic interests of ordinary workers?  (Our own favourite union,
which understands that in a changed world, economic nationalism means
more than old-time picket line struggles, can be found here:
http://www.solidaritytradeunion.org)

http://euobserver.com/9/23227/?rk=1

The EU's top court is gearing up for a ruling on a dispute between a
Latvian construction company and Sweden's trade unions which will
have profound implications for the extent to which member states
can protect themselves from cheaper workers from other EU countries.

The European Court of Justice held a hearing on Tuesday (9 January)
on the row between Latvian company Laval and a Swedish trade union,
with the firm accusing the Swedes of causing its bankruptcy through
their union protests.

The incident dates back to 2004 when the trade unionists urged Laval -
building a school in the Swedish city of Vaxholm - to pay higher
Swedish wages to its workers.

As the firm refused to do so - arguing that the minimum wage was
not imposed across Sweden while their workers were not members of
that particular trade union - the unionists pursued a blockade of
the construction site and forced the company to leave.

On Tuesday's hearing, some "old" member states - such as Denmark - came
to back Sweden in its argumentation while Latvia was supported by
Estonian and Lithuanian experts, according to press reports.

Laval's representatives argued that the row was based on protectionist
grounds as the Latvian workers took jobs away from their Swedish
counterparts, stressing that some protesters in Vaxholm literally
shouted "Latvians, go home!"

The Swedish trade union on the other hand maintained that Laval breached Swedish
laws as the labour conditions are determined through collective agreements in
the country so the firm should have signed up to them.

The ruling in the landmark case is to be announced later this year.

4.  MORE WORRIES ON ENERGY SECURITY & RUSSIAN GAS

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8210-2539246,00.html

Panic that Europe might be caught in the energy web of a Russian spider
is nothing new. At the height of the Cold War, the construction of
Soviet oil and gas pipelines to Europe alarmed America's Central
Intelligence Agency. Of particular concern was a plan for a
4,600-kilometre pipe to link Siberia's huge Urengoi gasfield to
Central Europe via Ukraine.

The spooks in Langley, Virginia, feared that reliance on Russian gas
would weaken Europe's resolve and undermine President Reagan's plan
to use economic sanctions to starve the Soviet military machine of
resources.

The US State Department did its best to persuade Europeans not to buy
Russian natural gas and Reagan placed sanctions on companies making
gas-compression turbines. According to an account by Thomas Reed, a
former member of Reagan's National Security Council, the CIA even
sabotaged the Urengoi pipeline, using the first computer virus, a sort
of Trojan horse that caused the pipeline software to go haywire,
reducing gas pressure to dangerous levels. According to Mr Reed, it
caused a massive explosion and fire in 1982.

His account is dismissed as rubbish by former KGB officials, who say
that bad construction caused the Urengoi blast. There is no doubt,
though, that the United States did its utmost to derail the Soviet plan
to capture Europe's energy markets. It pledged American coal to fill
the gap and promoted Norwegian gas as an alternative -- but the
pipelines were built and Russia proved to be an entirely reliable
energy supplier. Until January last year, when Gazprom cut off supplies
to Ukraine. This week it was Belarus's turn. Transneft has cut off an
oil pipeline through the former Soviet republic in a row over gas
prices and oil tariffs. Supplies of Urals crude to Poland, Germany and
Slovakia are reduced.

You don't have to be a Cold War zombie to see that the European Union
has been utterly complacent about its energy security. The spooks were
right. Their prediction that the Kremlin would use energy as a foreign
policy lever was premature, but it was right all the same. They were
right about the need to develop and promote Norwegian gas (it has come
on stream in the UK in the nick of time, and no thanks to Whitehall).
They were also right about the need for oil and gas pipelines linking
the Caspian Sea to Europe, projects ridiculed by some a decade ago as
uneconomic and politically adventurous. Oil from the Caspian is now
flowing down BP's pipeline to the Mediterranean, a route that avoids
the stranglehold of Transneft and provides a vital alternative to the
weak flow of oil from Iraq.

Europe is finally getting round to formulating an energy policy and
today it will make noises about a common policy towards Russia. It will
also wave a stick at Europe's big utilities, threatening to forcibly
unbundle their ownership of pipelines and grids if they don't allow
more competition.

Competition is overdue, but, unfortunately, unbundling downstream
offers less comfort in a market where supply choices are narrowing
upstream.

The European Commission's objective, breaking up the vertical
integration of the energy giants, is the antithesis of what Europe's
utilities are desperately trying to do in their search for energy
security. Gas-supply companies from Britain's Centrica to Italy's
Eni are scrambling to do deals with Gazprom, offering the Russian
utility a share in their consumer markets in return for the promise of
more gas.

There are many in the Commission, notably Neelie Kroes, the Competition
Commissioner, who would love to force Gaz de France and E.ON to sell
off their pipelines to a National Grid-type company. There is little
prospect of an ownership unbundling directive -- France and Germany
would do their utmost to block such a move. If Mrs Kroes finds enough
evidence of market abuse by a leading utility, she may use her
antitrust powers to force a pipeline disposal, but that, too, will
require powerful political backing.

Will she get support for a break-up of Europe's giant utilities? It
may be too late. The chance to build a competitive, efficient and
low-cost energy infrastructure may have been lost, the opportunity
superseded by a shift of power to upstream energy producers, most of
which are nationalised industries located in developing countries
governed by authoritarian regimes.

Is it sensible to weaken the financial and operational power of
Europe's biggest energy companies at a time when they are all
negotiating with a single producer for access to fuel? We have only to
look at Centrica, a company that is struggling to fill its tank. The
former marketing arm of British Gas was once the toast of the City,
celebrated for its brand. Gas was plentiful, suppliers were many and
Centrica had the customers. Today its customers are mobile and there is
only one supplier that matters.

Author: carl.mortished@thetimes.co.uk

5.  GLOBALIZATION IN RETREAT

http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3826

When it first became part of the English vocabulary in the early 1990s,
globalization was supposed to be the wave of the future. Fifteen years
ago, the writings of globalist thinkers such as Kenichi Ohmae and Robert
Reich celebrated the advent of the emergence of the so-called borderless
world. The process by which relatively autonomous national economies
become functionally integrated into one global economy was touted as
"irreversible. " And the people who opposed globalization were
disdainfully dismissed as modern day incarnations of the Luddites that
destroyed machines during the Industrial Revolution.

Fifteen years later, despite runaway shops and outsourcing, what passes
for an international economy remains a collection of national economies.
These economies are interdependent no doubt, but domestic factors still
largely determine their dynamics. Globalization, in fact, has reached
its high water mark and is receding.

BRIGHT PREDICTIONS, DISMAL OUTCOMES

During globalization's heyday, we were told that state policies no
longer mattered and that corporations would soon dwarf states. In fact,
states still do matter. The European Union, the U.S. government, and the
Chinese state are stronger economic actors today than they were a decade
ago. In China, for instance, trans- national corporations (TNCs) march
to the tune of the state rather than the other way around.

Moreover, state policies that interfere with the market in order to
build up industrial structures or protect employment still make a
difference. Indeed, over the last ten years, interventionist government
policies have spelled the difference between development and
underdevelopment, prosperity and poverty. Malaysia's imposition of
capital controls during the Asian financial crisis in 1997-98 prevented
it from unraveling like Thailand or Indonesia. Strict capital controls
also insulated China from the economic collapse engulfing its neighbors.

Fifteen years ago, we were told to expect the emergence of a
transnational capitalist elite that would manage the world economy.
Indeed, globalization became the "grand strategy" of the Clinton
administration, which envisioned the U.S. elite being the primus inter
pares -- first among equals -- of a global coalition leading the way to
the new, benign world order. Today, this project lies in shambles.
During the reign of George W. Bush, the nationalist faction has
overwhelmed the transnational faction of the economic elite.
Nationalism-inflected states are now competing sharply with one another,
seeking to beggar one another's economies.

A decade ago, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was born, joining the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as the pillars of
the system of international economic governance in the era of
globalization. With a triumphalist air, officials of the three
organizations meeting in Singapore during the first ministerial
gathering of the WTO in December 1996 saw the remaining task of "global
governance" as the achievement of "coherence," that is, the coordination
of the neoliberal policies of the three institutions in order to ensure
the smooth, technocratic integration of the global economy.

But now Sebastian Mallaby, the influential pro-globalization commentator
of the Washington Post, complains that "trade liberalization has
stalled, aid is less coherent than it should be, and the next financial
conflagration will be managed by an injured fireman." In fact, the
situation is worse than he describes. The IMF is practically defunct.
Knowing how the Fund precipitated and worsened the Asian financial
crisis, more and more of the advanced developing countries are refusing
to borrow from it or are paying ahead of schedule, with some declaring
their intention never to borrow again. These include Thailand,
Indonesia, Brazil, and Argentina. Since the Fund's budget greatly
depends on debt repayments from these big borrowers, this boycott is
translating into what one expert describes as "a huge squeeze on the
budget of the organization."

The World Bank may seem to be in better health than the Fund. But having
been central to the debacle of structural adjustment policies that left
most developing and transitional economies that implemented them in
greater poverty, with greater inequality, and in a state of stagnation,
the Bank is also suffering a crisis of legitimacy. This can only be
worsened by the recent finding of an official high-level expert panel
headed by former IMF chief economist Kenneth Rogoff that the Bank has
been systematically manipulating its data to advance its
pro-globalization position and conceal globalization's adverse effects.

But the crisis of multilateralism is perhaps most acute at the WTO. Last
July, the Doha Round of global negotiations for more trade
liberalization unraveled abruptly when talks among the so-called Group
of Six broke down in acrimony over the U.S. refusal to budge on its
enormous subsidies for agriculture. The pro-free trade American
economist Fred Bergsten once compared trade liberalization and the WTO
to a bicycle: they collapse when they are not moving forward. The
collapse of an organization that one of its director generals once
described as the "jewel in the crown of multilateralism" may be nearer
than it seems.

Why did globalization run aground?

First of all, the case for globalization was oversold. The bulk of the
production and sales of most TNCs continues to take place within the
country or region of origin. There are only a handful of truly global
corporations whose production and sales are dispersed relatively equally
across regions.

Second, rather than forge a common, cooperative response to the global
crises of overproduction, stagnation, and environmental ruin, national
capitalist elites have competed with each other to shift the burden of
adjustment. The Bush administration, for instance, has pushed a
weak-dollar policy to promote U.S. economic recovery and growth at the
expense of Europe and Japan. It has also refused to sign the Kyoto
Protocol in order to push Europe and Japan to absorb most of the costs
of global environmental adjustment and thus make U.S. industry
comparatively more competitive. While cooperation may be the rational
strategic choice from the point of view of the global capitalist system,
national capitalist interests are mainly concerned with not losing out
to their rivals in the short term.

A third factor has been the corrosive effect of the double standards
brazenly displayed by the hegemonic power, the United States. While the
Clinton administration did try to move the United States toward free
trade, the Bush administration has hypocritically preached free trade
while practicing protectionism. Indeed, the trade policy of the Bush
administration seems to be free trade for the rest of the world and
protectionism for the United States.

Fourth, there has been too much dissonance between the promise of
globalization and free trade and the actual results of neoliberal
policies, which have be en more poverty, inequality, and stagnation. One
of the very few places where poverty diminished over the last 15 years
is China. But interventionist state policies that managed market forces,
not neoliberal prescriptions, were responsible for lifting 120 million
Chinese out of poverty. Moreover, the advocates of eliminating capital
controls have had to face the actual collapse of the economies that took
this policy to heart. The globalization of finance proceeded much faster
than the globalization of production. But it proved to be the cutting
edge not of prosperity but of chaos. The Asian financial crisis and the
collapse of the economy of Argentina, which had been among the most
doctrinaire practitioners of capital account liberalization, were two
decisive moments in reality's revolt against theory.

Another factor unraveling the globalist project derives from its
obsession with economic growth. Indeed, unending growth is the
centerpiece of globalization, the mainspring of its legitimacy. While a
recent World Bank report continues-amazingly--to extol rapid growth as
the key to expanding the global middle class, global warming, peak oil,
and other environmental events are making it clear to people that the
rates and patterns of growth that come with globalization are a surefire
prescription for an ecological Armageddon.

The final factor, not to be underestimated, has been popular resistance
to globalization. The battles of Seattle in 1999, Prague in 2000, and
Genoa in 2001; the massive global anti-war march on Feb. 15, 2003, when
the anti-globalization movement morphed into the global anti-war
movement; the collapse of the WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun in 2003
and its near collapse in Hong Kong in 2005; the French and Dutch
peoples' rejection of the neoliberal, pro- globalization European
Constitution in 2005 -- these were all critical junctures in a
decade-long global struggle that has rolled back the neoliberal project.
But these high-profile events were merely the tip of the iceberg, the
summation of thousands of anti-neoliberal, anti- globalization struggles
in thousands of communities throughout the world involving millions of
peasants, workers, students, indigenous people, and many sectors of the
middle class.

DOWN BUT NOT OUT

While corporate-driven globalization may be down, it is not out. Though
discredited, many pro-globalization neoliberal policies remain in place
in many economies, for lack of credible alternative policies in the eyes
of technocrats . With things not moving at the WTO, the big trading
powers are emphasizing free trade agreements (FTAs) and economic
partnership agreements (EPAs) with developing countries. These
agreements are in many ways more dangerous than the multilateral
negotiations at the WTO since they often require greater concessions in
terms of market access and tighter enforcement of intellectual property
rights.

However, things are no longer that easy for the corporations and trading
powers and the corporations. Doctrinaire neoliberals are being eased out
of key positions, giving way to pragmatic technocrats that often subvert
neoliberal policies in practice owing to popular pressure. When it comes
to FTAs, the global south is becoming aware of the dangers and is
beginning to resist. Key South American governments under pressure from
their citizenries derailed the Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA) -- the
grand plan of George W. Bush for the Western hemisphere -- during the
Mar del Plata conference in November 2005.

Also, one of the reasons many people resisted Prime Minister Thaksin
Shinawatra in the months before the recent coup in Thailand was his rush
to conclude a free trade agreement with the United States. Indeed, in
January this year, some 10,000 protesters tried to storm the building in
Chiang Mai, Thailand, where U.S. and Thai officials were negotiating.
The government that succeeded Thaksin's has put the U.S.-Thai FTA on
hold, and movements seeking to stop FTAs elsewhere have been inspired by
the success of the Thai efforts.

The retreat from neoliberal globalization is most marked in Latin
America. Long exploited by foreign energy giants, Bolivia under
President Evo Morales has nationalized its energy resources. Nestor
Kirchner of Argentina gave an example of how developing country
governments can face down finance capital when he forced northern
bondholders to accept only 25 cents of every dollar Argentina owed them.
Hugo Chavez has launched an ambitious plan for regional integration, the
Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), based on genuine
economic cooperation instead of free trade, with little or no
participation by northern TNCs, and driven by what Chavez himself
describes as a "logic beyond capitalism."

GLOBALIZATION IN PERSPECTIVE

From today's vantage point, globalization appears to have been not a
new, higher phase in the development of capitalism but a response to the
underlying structural crisis of this system of production. Fifteen years
since it was trumpeted as the wave of the future, globalization seems to
have been less a "brave new phase" of the capitalist adventure than a
desperate effort by global capital to escape the stagnation and
disequilibria overtaking the global economy in the 1970s and 1980s. The
collapse of the centralized socialist regimes in Central and Eastern
Europe deflected people's attention from this reality in the early 1990s.

Many in progressive circles still think that the task at hand is to
"humanize" globalization. Globalization, however, is a spent force.
Today's multiplying economic and political conflicts resemble, if
anything, the period following the end of what historians refer to as
the first era of globalization, which extended from 1815 to the eruption
of World War I in 1914. The urgent task is not to steer corporate-driven
globalization in a "social democratic" direction but to manage its
retreat so that it does not bring about the same chaos and runaway
conflicts that marked its demise in that earlier era.

6. CHINA WARNS IT'S RETHINKING THE DOLLAR

As this bulletin has noted before, the anchor of the present globalist
economic order, and the free trade policy that is its hallmark, is in
the final analysis the power of the USA, both economic and military.
American military power has obviously hit a brick wall in Iraq.
America's economic power, expressed internationally by the strong dollar
that lets her buy up other nations' exports, is vulnerable, because the
strong dollar is only kept strong because big Asian exporters like China
and Japan choose to keep lending America hundreds of billions of dollars
to prop it up.  Why do they do this?  Because, despite viewing America
as a rival, they want to keep America hungry for their exports.
But they can't do this forever, because extending any debtor infinite
credit is a fool's game.  And when they stop, the dollar could fall by
half in a few months.   At which point no other nation is likely to step
up and bribe the entire world to pretend it believes in free trade,
something it only truly likes as long as it means big export opportunities.
At which point, the whole WTO (World Trade Organisation) era model of a
'borderless global economy' will evaporate.   That's why the story below
may be a sign that something big is in the offing.

http://www.newsmax.com/money/signup.cfm?goto=/money/topics/john_browne.cfm

Some very worrisome news came out of China this Saturday — but it got a
little more than a blip in the U.S. press.

At a high-level financial conference this past weekend, China’s Premier
Wen Jiabao said, “China would actively explore and expand the channels and
methods for using [its] foreign exchange reserves.”

Considering that the bulk of China’s reserves are in U.S. dollars, it
should send tremors about the future of the greenback.

The dollar has been reeling in recent years. A shift by China out of
dollars — as Wen is hinting — could be catastrophic.

China’s reserves recently surpassed Japan’s — now exceeding $1 trillion.
Some 70% of these reserves —– more than $700 million — are in dollars.

Interestingly, The Wall Street Journal carried this critical story on
page A7 of Monday’s editions with this pleasant spin headline:
“China Shift on Reserves Isn’t Likely to Hit Dollar.”

Perhaps I am missing something. China keeps most of its reserves in
dollars — and its leader just announced they plan on diversifying their
portfolio. This means it won’t affect the dollar?

It is of note that the Financial Times placed its report on the China
development smack in the center of Monday page one. Why would U.S. media
wish to play down such an important item?

While we believe that in the short-term the dollar may not be hurt — the
item should send tremors down the backs of U.S. dollar investors planning
to hold the greenback over the long-term.

The Journal reported that Wen’s statement was the “highest-level confirmation
yet that China is thinking actively how it can use its reserves, which have
increased by more that six times since 2000 and made China one of the worlds
largest holders of U.S. Treasury bonds.”

Later the article observed that, ". . . currency traders are hypersensitive
to any signs Beijing is losing its appetite for the U.S. currency.”

The FT went on to observe, “This policy switch opens the way for China,
which has been largely passive in managing its money to establish an
agency akin to Singapore’s government."

As I wrote in my Financial Intelligence email in December and in our sister
publication, Financial Intelligence Report, as the U.S. dollar depreciates,
China is actively reviewing its holdings of gold.

When China resumes, or even announces its intention to resume, its purchases
of gold, expect the price of gold to respond, as we have constantly warned,
possibly in a major manner.

Of course, we believe it is not in China’s short-term interests to disrupt
the currency markets or the U.S. dollar, of which it holds some $700 billion.

But, in the longer-term, we believe China will use all its strengths, including
economic and military to further its path towards super power status.

In this respect, we note last week’s news (given a low profile in our
mainstream media) that China had shot down one of its own defunct satellites,
500 miles out into space, at the same height as U.S. military satellites.
What sort of message does that send to any observant investor or military
strategist throughout the world?

To us it means that China is already on the march to super power status
and is our main challenge, even in times of peace.

We urge our readers and investors to pay great heed to the recent
announcements and especially actions of the Chinese, even if buried deeply
in our news media.

We believe that China’s actions are set to influence such key items as
the U.S. dollar (and therefore U.S. interest rates), world commodity
prices, gold, and U.S. defense strategy and spending.

.