What a morning! Question: Why is the dollar going up against the Euro when I keep saying that it is essentially nothing but paper and increasingly worthless?  Answer:  Without a lot of imagination there is nowhere else that most people are willing to go.  Oh, they may understand that gold is a safe haven, "they" being the large majority of investors, but that is looked down upon as a barbarous relic by the educated intelligentsia that dominates the world financial markets.  So, rather than think out of the box when something bad happens they look to what they consider the relatively safe place of the US dollar in spite of a decaying financial picture.

While the Euro reels from the Greek financial meltdown and the German led bail-out, the rest of the continent continues to passively wait for their own turn to tank. And while the Japanese are currently demonstrating a structural inability to break with tradition and operate differently, America looks strong in comparison, if for no other reason than we are doing something all the time even if the "something" is ultimately stupid.  And make no mistake about it, what we are doing at the macro level is really, really stupid.

This week so far, and it is only Tuesday, we have the president unveiling yet another appalling attempt to reform healthcare featuring retreaded horrible ideas with the "highlight" being,  get this, cost controls!  Then we have the republicans joining the democrats is passing a new $15 billion "Jobs Bill" which of course won't create any real new jobs.  Common sense is all you need to listen to when you consider that taking money from where it was made (the most productive place possible) and moving it somewhere else (taking a lot of administrative cost and adding rules along with the way), you get fewer not to mention lousier jobs as a result.  I suppose the republicans who are supposed to be free marketers went along with this mess because it was small (this is how inflation makes a lot of money sound like a little) at "only" $15 billion, it had a great name, and it showed "bipartisanship". This is also why those bums are not to be trusted any more than the democrats.

I can't wait to see what Wednesday brings.  But wait, this is only Tuesday morning; there is still time for yet another horrible new idea today.