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Message: <blockquote data-quote="monkeylove" data-source="post: 1105472" data-attributes="member: 19756">It's really an economic issue:The U.S. allowed the dollar to be used as a global reserve currency after WW2 in order to minimize the possibility of another global conflict. (When you sell to another country and receive their currency as payment, and when that country falls apart, decreasing the value of its currency, then you may be dragged down with it.)Having your currency as a global reserve creates a double-edged sword for you because whatever you try to sell to others becomes too expensive for them and whatever you can buy becomes a lot cheaper.The result is that you end up selling less and buying more, which is impossible because you need to earn in order to buy. To keep buying more, you borrow more, which means creating more dollars, and which you can do because as other countries grow economically then they need more dollars for trade. And you can take on more debt if you deregulate. That's why U.S. debts started going up with deregulation in the early 1980s.At some point you realize that it'd be cheaper to just build things near the markets where you want to sell, so you outsource. And if cheaper labor's close enough, then you can also outsource those, too.Meanwhile, more of your factory workers are about to retire, and their children, who went to trade school or college, are more interested in working in the service industry, where the pay's higher. So, that's another reason to outsource, too.And you see other countries doing the same as they grow richer, like several in Europe and even countries like Japan and South Korea. That's why when you look at those U.S., Japanese, and South Korean brands, you'll notice that they're made in China, India, etc.And as countries like China become richer, they start outsourcing, too, which is why half their manufacturing's assembly of components made in places like the Philippines, Indonesia, and so on.Similar happened to many countries. For example, Taiwan used to make semicoductors and slippers. And then it made semiconductors and computer parts. Now, it just focuses on the first and has to rely more on foreigners for factory work.Singapore used to make slippers, textiles, etc., then hard drives, and then now some armaments but focuses more on banking. Meanwhile, it's Thailand who took in hard drive manufacturing and even car assembly.In that case, you can only have cheap tech prices by importing, but you'll have to take on more debt because you can't export enough. If you want to avoid more debt, then you'll have to start making tech yourself, but if locals demand $20 an hour for that, then you'll still end up with high tech prices, plus you might not be able to sell a lot overseas because your prices are too high.Finally, this reminds me of warnings from contractors saying that if Trump cracks down on immigration, then building prices will go up. It's as if they're implicitly admitting that the reason why they've been able to keep those prices low is because they've been relying significantly on illegal labor!Here's the punchline: what happens if more countries, as they grow stronger economically (and they are), start moving away from the dollar for trade?</blockquote>

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