Even though there’s no space shuttle, now.
Whoever’s writing The Drudge Report had this as one of the top stories.
There’s something The Experts seem to always forget — it’s not 1987. Things that were difficult and expensive in 1987 are now basically instant and free-of-charge.
I remember heading into the stairwell of the quarters where we lived during that time to fetch our copy of The Stars and Stripes. One of the pages covered the exchange rates. AFN would also have the daily exchange rates at the end of its newscasts. If you were travelling among the countries within NATO, you needed to carry the local countries’ currency with you. You could easily find yourself in countries with three different currencies within an hour’s drive.
Going to Bastogne to tour the Battle of the Bulge battlefields? Neat! Make sure you have Belgian and Luxembourg Francs. If you’re getting there through France, you’ll want some French Francs. If you’re coming in through The Netherlands, make sure you’ve got some Guilder. (Traveler’s tip, too — the 5NLG coin was exactly the same size as a 5DM coin….and that’ll help save you on a pack of cigarettes from the fence-top machines when you get back to Germany)
But back to whatever interest rate is being paid on the US Dollar — it doesn’t matter very much today. Don’t like what the US is paying, and you’re worried that the dollar isn’t correctly-valued? Move to another currency. It’ll take a few minutes, and if the difference in return might make up for whatever costs you’ve paid to do the conversion almost immediately.
So go to EUR. CDN. DOGE. It really doesn’t matter what a central bank does. If your wealth is spread among many asset classes around the world, whatever the Federal Reserve does isn’t going to take everything.
(Am I disturbed by what pretty much every western government has done for the last quarter-century? Absolutely. But it’s not just the US Federal Reserve.)