The dollar fell below parity with the Swiss franc for the first time on Friday as fears about more credit turmoil and a U.S. recession sparked broad selling of the U.S. currency.

The dollar fell to an all-time low of 0.9987 Swiss francs , according to electronic trading platform EBS. It last traded at 1.0026 francs.

First the Canadian dollar, now the franc.

This is bad folks.. America is slipping..

Dollar falls below parity vs Swiss franc

The United States' second-richest man has delivered a blunt message to the Bush administration: he wants to pay more tax.

Warren Buffett, the famous investor known as the "Sage of Omaha", has complained that he pays a lower rate of tax than any of his staff - including his receptionist. Mr Buffett, who is worth an estimated $52bn (�25bn), said: "The taxation system has tilted towards the rich and away from the middle class in the last 10 years. It's dramatic; I don't think it's appreciated and I think it should be addressed."

During an interview with NBC television, Mr Buffett brandished an informal survey of 15 of his 18 office staff at his Berkshire Hathaway empire. The billionaire said he was paying 17.7% payroll and income tax, compared with an average in the office of 32.9%.

"There wasn't anyone in the office, from the receptionist up, who paid as low a tax rate and I have no tax planning; I don't have an accountant or use tax shelters. I just follow what the US Congress tells me to do," he said.

Warren Buffett: "I should pay more tax"

Canada's dollar traded equal to the U.S. currency for the first time in three decades, capping a five-year run on the back of booming demand for the nation's commodities.

The Canadian dollar has achieved parity with the USD. Really, I'm not shitting you...

Oh Canada, true patriot love at all thy dollars' command...

Alan Greenspan, who was chairman of the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, in a long-awaited memoir, is harshly critical of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Republican-controlled Congress, as abandoning their party’s principles on spending and deficits.

In the 500-page book, “The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World,” Mr. Greenspan describes the Bush administration as so captive to its own political operation that it paid little attention to fiscal discipline, and he described Mr. Bush’s first two Treasury secretaries, Paul H. O’Neill and John W. Snow, as essentially powerless.

Greenspan's book -- The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World -- is going to be a must read...

Fed’s Ex-Chief Attacks Bush on Fiscal Role - New York Times

This is a very cool web tool for graphing and mapping out various economic indicators over time.

There is a one-minute demo in the help section.

The Gapminder World 2006, beta

Banks and ATM machines are an unfamiliar sight in the rural countryside here, but the government hopes to change that with new technology that could ease the transition from cash to computers.

A pilot program will put 15 biometric ATMs at village kiosks in five districts across southern India. The machines are expected to serve about 100,000 workers who will use fingerprint scanners, rather than ATM cards and PINs, to obtain their funds.

I've read several things over time that have gotten me fairly excited about the idea of micro-lending in poor communities. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Wired News: Thumb-Print Banking Takes India

This is your country on Medicare and Social Security.

The ratio of federal debt held by the public to GDP would climb from 37 percent currently to roughly 100 percent in 2030 and would continue to grow exponentially after that. The only time in U.S. history that the debt-to-GDP ratio has been in the neighborhood of 100 percent was during World War II. People at that time understood the situation to be temporary and expected deficits and the debt-to-GDP ratio to fall rapidly after the war, as in fact they did. In contrast, under the scenario I have been discussing, the debt-to-GDP ratio would rise far into the future at an accelerating rate. Ultimately, this expansion of debt would spark a fiscal crisis, which could be addressed only by very sharp spending cuts or tax increases, or both.

There is some very sound advice in here. The following statement seems so logical and obvious that one wonders why the Fed Chief has to say it.

Members of the Congress who put special emphasis on keeping tax rates low must accept that low tax rates can be sustained only if outlays, including those on entitlements, are kept low as well. Likewise, members who favor a more expansive role of the government, including relatively more-generous benefits payments, must recognize the burden imposed by the additional taxes needed to pay for the higher spending, a burden that includes not only the resources transferred from the private sector but also any adverse economic incentives associated with higher tax rates.

Unfortunately, there are a whole lot of people who are living in total denial about this.

Fed chief Bernanke's prepared testimony before Senate - Jan. 18, 2007

From Decius:

Some really nice infoporn over at The Big Picture right now. The linked chart compares the assets of various nations organized into geopolitical buckets.

Notice that Asia, for all its mindshare, is still relatively tiny, and the U.S., despite her plethora of self-inflicted woes, remains globally dominant.

In other words, America can screw up an aweful lot for a long time before international competitors are really a threat to her economic position. (Although a commenter in the thread observes that U.S. asset prices may be unfairly high due to foreign currencies being pegged to the dollar.) Also worth a look is this chart which vaugely compares the GDP of various nations with various U.S. States. I'm sure you're heard before that California has roughly the GDP of France (and half the population) but I didn't know that Texas has a comparable GDP to Canada. And Georgia, oh Georgia, if only your ski slopes were as nice as your GDP...

Its worth comparing top lists for GDP between 1995 and 2005. There have been some significant changes. For example, Canada appears to be falling behind in international terms, although I don't know if that is due to failings on her part, or simply that far more populous countries are starting to get their acts together. Brazil is rocketing up, but they have 6 times the population of Canada. Canada's population is comparable to California, but it is spread out over a far wider area, which probably makes it less efficient. (I also think that weather plays a role. Snow plows cost money.)

As various countries begin to figure out how to operate effective economies and stable politics you'd think that these charts would normalize toward a reflection of population differences, with some effects due to geographic constraints such as those I mentioned for Canada. Of course, I'm describing a vision for world peace. I think we're a long way off, but it appears progress is being made.

A longer term investment in ETFs targetting countries that have moved significantly between 1995 and 2005 might be a very sound idea if coupled with a reasonable understanding of and monitoring of the political and economic stability of the countries in question. Of course, I'm not an economist, so take that with a grain of salt.

The Big Picture | How big IS the US anyway?

Milton Friedman, the Nobel-prize winning economist who helped shape and define free-market economic theory, died Thursday at the age of 94 in San Francisco.

RIP.. We owe much to Friedman.

Update: This brief article about an experience an editor had playing tennis with Friedman says much about this tact and character..

Nobel economist Milton Friedman dead at 94 - Nov. 16, 2006

Internet traffic in Zimbabwe has come close to a standstill after an international satellite firm slashed its bandwidth because the cash-starved government failed to pay the bill.

The Zimbabwe Internet Service Providers Association (ZISPA) said on its Web site that TelOne's connection had been severed, causing an "almost collapse" of the Internet in the country. It said ZISPA would lobby the government to help it pay the debt.

Chingwaru said TelOne had asked the government for permission to charge big companies in foreign currency to avoid being cut off in the future.

Truly amazing... Mugabe is running such a poor show over there, that companies want permission to charge customers in foreign currency, because the central banking system is broken. One of Stratfor's recent podcasts suggested that Mugabe's government is close to collapse, so this is not that shocking.

Zimbabwe's Net crawls due to unpaid debt | Tech News on ZDNet