Let Rome in Tiber melt

Rome did melt into the Tiber. The place was invaded by barbarians...the population sank from over a million to under 100,000. And when the city was “rediscovered” by tourists with a sense of history in the 17th century...there were goats grazing amid the ruins of the ancient city.



There are people who believe that power, progress, and wealth are always on a rising slope. Let them come to Rome!



Roman property was a sell for a period of probably a thousand years...from the peak of Roman power, around 100 AD, down to its nadir, sometime after the Renaissance.



We have come to Rome on your behalf, dear reader. We poke through its dusty ruins looking for the future. There are more ruins to come, we think...



(Oh, the labors we undertake for your sake, dear reader. Last night, trying to get in the spirit of the place, we drank nearly a whole bottle of wine from Abruzzo. Today, we will go with a Tuscan variety...)



But let us first look at the news:



“Does the US matter any more?” The question comes to us from the head of research at Societe Generale . Looking at the data from the International Energy Agency in Paris, reported in this space yesterday, he noticed that now China, Russia, India and the Mideast use more oil than the USA. What’s more, energy use in America is going down...while it is skyrocketing in those other countries. Thanks largely to growing demand in the emerging markets...and the falling value of the U.S. currency...the price of oil hit a new record yesterday – at $118.



The United States matters less and less to the oil market – but is still very important, of course.



We have guessed that the United States of America is a sell. Its money, its paper, its property, its labor, its stocks, its industries, its debt – sell them all.



We don’t mind saying so...still, we don’t like to hear the foreigners say it. A man may have noticed the swelling with his own eyes; still he doesn’t like to hear a stranger say his wife is getting fat. So when the Financial Times comes out with an article saying the same thing, it sticks in our craw.



At least the FT is nice enough to use a euphemism. Instead of seeing the United States on its knees, it sees the “end of unipolarity.” As we all know, when the Soviet Union threw in the towel in 1989, the US was the world’s undisputed hegemon. America was on top of the world – with no real competition. It was a “unipolar” world, as the FT would put it. The stock market boomed. The dollar rose. America’s chest swelled with homegrown pride and the entire world’s credit. And by the late ’90s, President Clinton summed it up: “things couldn’t get better,” he said.









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