I don't get this at all, eh?
*From Feudal Serf To Spender, This Wonderful World of Purchase Power*


You just can't beat the Pink Avenger to break something interesting to you,

Canadian shoppers are up in arms. Many have suddenly noticed that their dollar does not have the same purchasing power as the US dollar, and they are struggling to understand why.

The comparison has become much easier in the past 10 days since the "loonie" - named after the aquatic bird on the Canadian one-dollar coin - soared to parity with the greenback for the first time in 31 years.

With the currencies at one-for-one, consumers no longer need to do any arithmetic to work out that the conversion rate on foreign exchange markets is not the same as that on store shelves.

Thus, the price of Alan Greenspan's just-released memoir, The Age of Turbulence, is listed on the dust-jacket as C$26.45, but just US$20.99. Similarly, the cover price of the Financial Times is $2 in New York but C$2.50 in Toronto.

Douglas Porter, deputy chief economist at the Bank of Montreal, calculated last week that the prices on a random sampling of goods were an average of 24 per cent higher in Canadian dollars than US dollars.

Complaints are streaming in to newspaper letter columns and radio talk shows.

"Why are we not seeing the price stickers on many goods going down?" asked the host of a two-hour phone-in show on the issue on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on Sunday afternoon. Some callers noted that businesses were quick to push prices up when the loonie sank to an all-time low of 62 US cents in early 2002.

The reason? A combination of things. For one, the mentality of prepetual inflation for prepetual prosperity has obliterated Say's Law and Gresham's Law from collective consciousness of the retail industry. Two, buisinesses, unaccostomed to such windfalls, intends to milk it for as long as they can. Third, in all fairness, the decimination of downward price changes has never had a 1:1 time ratio, historically. It's a bit like the opposite of the stock market rule: stocks go upprices go down the stairs and drop out the rise meteorically out the window.

It's just a coincidence, but I seem to recall a Dutch girl I went to skrool with once telling me how everything got more expensive once they switched from guilders to euros. Just a penny for your thoughts...