The Canadians have a joke that goes like this:
Today there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that our national debt is now 600 billion dollars. The good news is that it is all in Canadian dollars!
There's something to be said for a national siff-upper-lippedness that can make fun of a currency widely regarded as worthless even by it's own users.
I only mention it because I read in the New York Daily News that yesterday the US dollar hit parity with the Canadian dollar (down from about a dollar sixty four a year or so ago). When I mentioned this to a colleague he pointed out that a US dollar only got you around 48 UK pence these days too.
Thirty years ago the same thing happened, a period characterised these days as the height of the worst recession in recent history.
Tell me again how strong our economy is, Mr President, then explain how you can draw that conclusion when nobody values our goods, our people or even our money.
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