Indonesian government had tried three systems of exchange rate, just to fit with the national economic condition. Just like any other country, Indonesia implemented the fixed exchanger rate on early years after its independence.
During the Sukarno era, the government lifted most restrictions on international transactions that were heavily regulated. To maintain the exchange rate, BI was obliged to buy or sell as much foreign currency as demanded to get the predetermined rate. Fortunately, country reserve was far bigger than the debts, due to Guided Economy system, a new economy system stressing socialist and co-operative ideals with priorities given to state-run companies than private ones, so had enough finance to do that.
On the year of 1970, government decided to let rupiah sold freely against a basket of currencies of country’s main trading partner, such as US dollar, Japanese Yen or Dutch Guilder. However, Bank Indonesia had to intervene in the market, so that rupiah kept on desired range of currency price against the dollar. Every morning, the central bank had announced the highest and lowest level of price of rupiah to one dollar. For over 25 years, BI had revised the limit for seven times.
Asian financial crisis reduced the rupiah value almost one third overnight. On June 1997, rupiah had traded on Rp3,035 per dollar, and it reached the lowest level of Rp16,800 to one dollar just exact one year later.
In view to secure foreign exchange reserved, made the monetary policies more effective, the Government phased out the intervention band and adopted a freely floating exchange rate system, since August 1997.
However, analyst Farial Anwar of Currency Management said Indonesia just an IMF’s victim. “It created too much speculators,” he said. The rupiah, he added, is more sensitive toward rumours on the political situation rather than toward economic fundamental. And it necessity to restrain the exchange of rupiah with implemented again the managed float system. Because the more rupiah is fluctuate, the more uncertainty in the business.
As November 2006, rupiah is selling on Rp9,100 to one dollar.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Sunday, November 19, 2006
When he thought something gonna be happen...
All fixed, fast, froze relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed once become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with her kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its product chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, and establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose product are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the world.
In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the product distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nation into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are heavily artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
My God!! I can't believe that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote it on their phenomenal book Communist Manifesto. The book was published in 1848. Almost one and a half centuries ago! Were they read the future, palm reading, maybe??
While the shrinking and flattening of the world that we are seeing today constitute a difference of degree from what Marx saw happening in his day, it is nevertheless part of the same historical trend Marx highlighted in his writing of capitalism – the inexorable march of technology and capital to remove all barriers, boundaries, frictions, and restrains to global commerce.
Marx was one of the first to glimpse the possibility of the world as a global market, uncomplicated by national boundaries. Marx was capitalism’s fiercest critic, and yet he stood in awe of its bower to break down barriers and create a worldwide system of production and consumption. In the Communist Manifesto, he described capitalism as a force that would dissolve all feudal, national, and religious identities, giving rise to a universal civilization governed by market imperatives.
Marx considered it inevitable that capital would have its way – inevitable and also desirable. Because once capitalism destroyed all national and religious allegiances, Marx though, it would lay bare the stark struggle between capital and labor. Force to compete in a global race to the bottom, the workers of the world would unite in a global revolution to end oppression. Deprived of consoling distractions such as patriotism and religion, they would see their exploitation clearly and rise up to end it.
Indeed, reading the Communist Manifesto, it is hard to believe that Marx detailed the forces that were flattening the world during the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and how much he foreshadowed the way these same forces keep flattening the world right up to the present. Wow!
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose product are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the world.
In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the product distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nation into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are heavily artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
My God!! I can't believe that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote it on their phenomenal book Communist Manifesto. The book was published in 1848. Almost one and a half centuries ago! Were they read the future, palm reading, maybe??
While the shrinking and flattening of the world that we are seeing today constitute a difference of degree from what Marx saw happening in his day, it is nevertheless part of the same historical trend Marx highlighted in his writing of capitalism – the inexorable march of technology and capital to remove all barriers, boundaries, frictions, and restrains to global commerce.
Marx was one of the first to glimpse the possibility of the world as a global market, uncomplicated by national boundaries. Marx was capitalism’s fiercest critic, and yet he stood in awe of its bower to break down barriers and create a worldwide system of production and consumption. In the Communist Manifesto, he described capitalism as a force that would dissolve all feudal, national, and religious identities, giving rise to a universal civilization governed by market imperatives.
Marx considered it inevitable that capital would have its way – inevitable and also desirable. Because once capitalism destroyed all national and religious allegiances, Marx though, it would lay bare the stark struggle between capital and labor. Force to compete in a global race to the bottom, the workers of the world would unite in a global revolution to end oppression. Deprived of consoling distractions such as patriotism and religion, they would see their exploitation clearly and rise up to end it.
Indeed, reading the Communist Manifesto, it is hard to believe that Marx detailed the forces that were flattening the world during the rise of the Industrial Revolution, and how much he foreshadowed the way these same forces keep flattening the world right up to the present. Wow!
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Are we born to be free?
Free will is the most difficult of God's gifts to understand or appreciate.
Freedom is one of the most valuable things there is, although many of us have no idea how precious it is until we suffer the loss of it. It is considered to be one of the basic human rights, and to attempt to withhold that right without very just cause is a most serious sin. We all like to think that we are free and that we have free will when making our choices in life — but let us think for a moment about the realities of the situation. Are we really born to be free? And if so, in what ways? What does this mean for us?
I think free will is something God granted to human beings which He did not grant to angels...
...because humans have the power to change through their own free will, and these decisions alter their fates.
Freedom is one of the most valuable things there is, although many of us have no idea how precious it is until we suffer the loss of it. It is considered to be one of the basic human rights, and to attempt to withhold that right without very just cause is a most serious sin. We all like to think that we are free and that we have free will when making our choices in life — but let us think for a moment about the realities of the situation. Are we really born to be free? And if so, in what ways? What does this mean for us?
I think free will is something God granted to human beings which He did not grant to angels...
...because humans have the power to change through their own free will, and these decisions alter their fates.
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