Your heart is in the right place-yes Krugman and his internationalist ilk are distinctly anti-American and anti free market.
However you're making a few assumptive errors in your posts-errors in thinking that I too frequently make.
For starters, the Dollar: I wouldn't categorize the greenback as cheap. Except against the Yen it's pretty much at "average" prices.
EVERY NATION is trying to weaken their currency. Think outside the box. The India's and Iran's of the world ARE NOT saying, "America's balance of payments suck, we don't trust dollars." Instead the rest of the world is saying, "how can we export our way out of our own recession if the Dollar continues to be competitively valued. Perhaps we can use threats to convince U.S. policy makers to support their currency "
To wit: Other than the Dollar what has become the worlds true flight to quality currency? The low yielding, backed by 2.7x more debt to GDP than the dollar, no natural resources, Japanese Yen.
If the dollar is mere garbage based on your set of fundamentals than the Yen should be bona fide rat shit using the same criteria.
Also as far as the destruction of asset wealth: keep in mind that those dollars banks lent creating a housing "bubble" didn't go up in smoke. They were paid to
sellers. For every buyer who owns a condo priced in the stratosphere with bank money there is a seller who pocketed the money. Even in even out. It's only the mark to market of real estate on the decline acting as an asset wealth destroyer. U.S. home prices are still at levels above 2003-so the "bubble" part of the rise has filled in but the base line is intact. (maybe not forever but for now at least.)
As long as Asia remains the Factory For The West, i.e. unencumbered by protectionism, they will support the dollar and support Treasury securities.
My best guess is many of these currency and debt markets are going to trade essentially sideways for years without challenging last years highs nor taking out the early year lows.
Quote from PragmaticIdeals:
You speak of idealism, and yet you dogmatically propose that printing an "unimaginable" amount of money is somehow pragmatic.
Let's break down the mechanics of what really transpired, in essence:
1) Decades of artificially low interest rates and allowing banks to sell loans to 3rd parties (securitization), combined with a massive consumer (irrational) appetite for debt, caused a housing super-spike that has only deflation by about 50% thus far.
2) Trillions of "dollars" that the bank "created" and loaned, had 0 economic underlying value. Zero. They essentially gave money to someone with no means of repaying it, and this person spent it on buying an asset whose value was artifically high precisely due to incessant lending (increased demand).
3) The spike in household wealth likely spiked the stock market far beyond its economic means since people, businesses and banks invested and consumed more, thinking they were wealthy (income effect).
To sum up:
The economy was nothing more than a bubble of epic proportions, with 0 economic value underlying the "dollars" of wealth that is being "destroyed."
The wealth has dissapeared, but the debt remains.
Of course, some sort of financial system stabilization is required (preferably in the form of an accountable government-run system, or at least massively regulated like Canada). However, excessive money-printing to re-inflate the bubble and re-spike asset/stock prices will do nothing except shift the burden to future periods to feel the pain of the "wealth destruction".
The problem is that the further you stave off the pain, the EXPONENTIALLY larger the debt from the deficit-spending becomes, due to the time-value of money.
1 dollar of debt today to pump up a meaningless stock market (0 underlying economic value) will be many more dollars of debt that a future generation will have to pay.
A generation already encumbered by the debts generated by today's generation and likely won't even have the dollar as the world reserve currency to help bail them out.