www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,157948,00.html
FOXFAN CENTRAL Who's Stealing the US's Economic Identity? Sunday, May 29, 2005 By Susan C Walker It's become the recurring story of the week: Such-and-such company admits that thieves hacked into its database and got away with the identities of tens of thousands of individuals. Identity theft is a metaphor for an even larger yet untol d story: the theft of our countrys economic identity. In recent months, you may have heard about the work of identity thieves a t ChoicePoint (145,000 personal files), the University of California at Berkeley (93,000 personal files), then T-Mobile International (only one cell phone belonging to a Ms Paris Hilton, it seems), and most recently the database giant Lexis-Nexis (310,000 personal files). That's a lot of citizens who suddenly worry that a faceless, nameless thi ef will take their name and destroy their credit or worse. But bad as it is, maybe we're missing the forest for the trees: that is, the theft of the United States' identity as the economic leader of the free world. Ri ght now, institutions around the world keep massive deposits of US dol lars to facilitate their own currency exchange needs and handle internat ional transactions. Some say the buck can't continue in this unique role , due to issues that include: a (very) fractional reserve banking system that encourages banks to lend out every dollar they take in; a workforce encumbered by historically high personal and corporate debt levels.
Last year the dollar plunged in value as quickly as we could spend it. It may rally a bit this year, but most smart analysts think the greenback is in for hard times over the long haul up to and including the unthin kable: foreign governments abandoning it as their go-to currency. The US loves its oil, as evidenced by the fa ct that we are its largest consumer in the world. But our liquid lover t hese days appears how should we say this? We've never been diligent savers of money the way cit izens of many other nations are, but for most of our history we kept som e cash in the savings account. Yet today we've been replaced by pod peop le who believe it's their right to have whatever they want whenever they want it, even if they don't have the income to afford that new car or f ancy electronic equipment. "Give me my line of credit now" is our new ra llying cry. Now, most of the t hings we love such as cell phones, computers, and cars are being mad e better in Asia. Since the recession of 2001, we've lost more than 3 million manufacturing jobs. We love our service economy, but what happens when our manufactur ing plants have shut down, and we can't make things for ourselves anymor e? As Elliott Wave International's Robert Prechter points out, "The only rea son the overall economy is expanding at all is the employment generated in the financial and construction sector." And while both of these secto rs depend on ever-higher price gains in the investment markets and real estate, in neither case are continued gains a foregone conclusion. It used to be that people lived in the homes they purchased. But one sign that our housing sector is getting beyond itself is a recent story in the May 12 Christian Science Monitor about the Aderra condominium project in Scotts dale, Ariz. The developer wants owners to enjoy the swimming pools and the golf cours e, "but there is one thing they won't be able to do: sell their condos that is, not until the developer has sold every one of the $190,000 to $400,000 units." The article goes on to say that developers have begun p utting limits on how soon buyers can resell their properties in the hope of keeping "one of the greatest real estate markets in the nation's his tory from becoming one of the biggest busts." If a home is only an investment, has its identity been stolen? Nobody worries about identity theft until it happens to them. Similarly, most of us live in a dream-state about our economy, too. We buy expensiv e homes as investments, pretend there will always be enough good-paying jobs to go around, and expect the dollar to go on being the world's rese rve currency. It isn't easy to live happily ever after when a hacker steals your Social Security number and credit card numbers. Similarly, it won't be easy fo r the United States to live happily ever after when we wake up from our collective dream and realize that we're no longer the most powerful nati on on earth, thanks to our economy being sapped by no one else but ourse lves. We're the ones who overspend, we're the ones who fail to save, we' re the ones who buy gas-guzzling cars. Goodness knows, we're even letting our government get away with spending on an unprecedented scale. So, the next time you read about thieves hacking into a database, think a bout how much of our national economic identity we've lost already.
Elliott Wave International, a market foreca sting and technical analysis company. magazine, a newspaper writer and editor, an investor relations executive and a speechwriter for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Sh e received her BA in Classics from Stanford University.
|
http://csua.com/feed/