CheetahhhhhhhBlog Mark III

My dream is to have 5 minutes without being covered in baby goo. It’s a dream I have.

Anyway Ramadan vacation starts on Wednesday, which means the kids will stop coming to school on Monday. We fly to Riyadh next Saturday for Vanessa’s interview with the US embassy.

I must say that, as usual, Ramadan is starting to irritate me. It’s because nothing is open until 10PM. Considering my bedtime is about 930PM, this is a problem. We can’t get anything done. Thankfully this is the last week of Ramadan and another spell of nonsense is behind me. This year, because I need to go pick up my drycleaning etc at 10PM, I have started taking siestas. It’s nice.

It’s Saudi national day, so no work. We drove out into the desert to one of the bays of the Red Sea, so I could go fishing. We bought some camp chairs and a cooler for the expedition. The thing with this area, called the sharm, the thing with the sharm is it’s 45 minutes from our house, and we have no way of knowing the weather or tidal conditions until we get there. So we arrived at low tide with a dust storm blowing up. I spent an hour trying to cast. I know the fish are there. I could see many. But the wind swiftly grew so strong that I couldn’t cast more than a foot. It was very frustrating. Soon the waves grew into whitecaps and I gave up. Vanessa has been telling me I should forget about flyfishing. She says it’s fine for rivers and lakes, but it won’t work in the ocean. This is not so and when she said I should cast bait, I told her that was sacrilege. I have been rather unfortunate with my new Orvis saltwater flyfishing gear, indeed, I am a bit depressed to say I haven’t caught a fish yet. However this is partly because I don’t know what I’m doing in salt water, and partly, like today, just bad luck of arriving when the wind was too strong.

I’ve been griping about the greenback’s steady decline for a year now. Finally the Wall Street Journal has started to pay attention. If you check out Market Beat Blog (subscription probably required), which I read religiously every morning, you’ll note a lot of chatter about the dollar’s new lows. I predict we’ll bottom out at about $1.45 to the Euro. Most disturbing is that the Canadian dollar is now worth more than the greenback. That just ain’t right. It’s like hell froze over or something. Anyway the folks back home should expect inflation to grow, as imports become more expensive. And you guys should expect me and the family to be vacationing Stateside for the foreseeable future, because with the new lows in the dollar, we officially can’t afford to travel anywhere else.

Yes indeed, it’s become rather catastrophic, which is why, I think, the Wall Street Journal is starting to discuss it in detail. For me it’s particularly catastrophic, since the Saudi riyal is pegged to the dollar. If you measure my salary against the Euro or sterling, I have lost about 30% of my income in the last 3 years. Thankfully I have the luxury of simply not going to Europe and not buying European products. Which I will certainly be doing. Pity, really. For example, we drink French water in my house, and I already know it’s expensive, but I bet you it’s going to be getting even more expensive. I feel bad for my colleagues at work who go home to London. They’re really screwed. I’m going to make a study of which countries are pegged to the dollar, and limit my travel to them. This is the only sensible ting to do at the moment. I know the Emirates are pegged to the Saudi riyal, which means they’re pegged to the dollar. There’s Peru, where you can pay for anything in dollars or sole. I’m scratching my head about where else we can go without being gouged. The real irony is that the Philippines, by all accounts, should be a cheap place. But I tell you, it was a tad more expensive last summer. Still cheap enough I suppose, but I really did notice that my pocketbook has lighter. Indeed I was planning on buying an ocean-front house in Capoocan next summer, but mark my words, that ain’t happenin’ without the greenback’s cooperation. In this instance, luckily, there is no real real estate market in Capoocan, and the house will likely still be there in 2-3 years.

The Fed’s rate cut should probably spur Wall Street into the traditional Christmas season advances, which means the Cheetahhhhhh will shortly take his money out of money markets and put it back into index mutual funds. I generally stick with European indexes these days because they mirror Wall Street by about 80% but without some of Wall Street’s volatility. The Cheetahhhhhhhh plays only one financial game, and that’s the indexes. However I will wait a few days because we will probably get some profit-taking after the big jump yesterday.

The Wall Street Journal describes the Fed’s rate cut as “another nail in the dollar’s coffin”. And indeed the dollar is at 1.39 to the Euro now. I planned for this and one cent more, and the Cheetahhhhhhh will start making profit. However I don’t like it of course. There is some talk that the Arabian gulf countries will implement a unified currency which is not pegged to the dollar. This however will take years to implement, and I’m not certain I’ll stick around long enough to appreciate it (though who knows). Also, all things go in cycles, especially all things monetary. So the best thing to do now, really, is to spend your dollars in places that take the greenback, such as the USA or Peru, and to avoid everywhere else, because it’ll cost you big. I may be taking my vacations in the States if things don’t improve, though this would go against my natural inclination, ie, to vacation on tropical beaches. Unfortunately I predict further declines in the dollar, because the US election season generally triggers weakness in the dollar. However the dollar  will eventually strengthen again, so for those of you who are actually affected by dollar weakness, the best thing you can do now is simply wait, and keep everything denominated in dollars. If you buy Euros now, for example, you’ll get screwed. They’re too expensive.