My daughter is bouncing up and down with excitement. This afternoon she lost another baby tooth (her third to date) and she knows that the tooth fairy will visit her tonight and leave her some money. I remember the feeling. As a kid, whenever I lost a tooth I could look forward to finding a shiny new quarter under my pillow the next morning.
Times have changed.
These days the tooth fairy is a dollar skeptic. I know this because instead of putting a quarter under the pillow, the tooth fairy now leaves an American Eagle for each tooth lost. By the time my daughter’s adult teeth have all come in, she’ll be sitting on two pounds of silver (and unlike her father, she won’t be able to blow all her tooth fairy loot on Donkey Kong).
Perhaps the tooth fairy has been reading the recent financial news. The Independent reports that Japan, France, Russia, China, and the Gulf Arab states have realized that the American dollar really is backed by the full faith and credit of the US government, and they’d prefer a reliable guarantee instead. The US government’s debt is expected to reach 100% of GDP within the next two years, and “Helicopter” Ben Bernanke has created trillions of new dollars in the past year alone. Given the astronomical amounts of money some of these foreign central banks have loaned the Feds to cover their wild-eyed bipartisan spending spree, one can understand why they might not appreciate being paid back with a rapidly depreciating currency like the US greenback. This may explain in part the recent uptick in the price of gold, which has been mentioned as a possible replacement for the dollar in international transactions.
It’s as if foreign central banks (and the rest of us, for that matter) are locked in an international game of musical chairs. When the music stops, the last one holding dollars loses. It won’t be easy for the countries that are sitting on trillions of US dollar reserves to divest themselves of their holdings without accelerating the currency’s demise, but for my part I hope they figure it out soon – and that they let me know how to do it, too. I think I hear the music winding down, and I’m all out of baby teeth to leave under the pillow.
(Tooth Fairy painting by Jenedy Paige).
