Not exactly fresh news, but its been reported that Dick Cheney, our beloved vice-president is betting against the US Dollar. He has tens of millions of dollars in foreign government bond and currency funds and international and emerging market stocks. His excuse is that it’s in a blind fund and he doesn’t know what his advisers invest in. That sounds like complete rubbish to me. I can’t imagine someone as intelligent as Dick Cheney not knowing what a huge chunk of his reported $95 million networth is invested in.

I’ve believed for sometime now that the government actually wants a weaker dollar and have been investing accordingly, but having the vice-president profit from it is a bit too unethical. The fact that he’s been profiting from the war in Iraq through no-bid contracts to Halliburton (in which he still retains a large amount of shares) is bad enough. If this had been China, he’d have been executed for bringing dishonor to his country!

Ethics aside, at least he’s good at investing. By being bearish on the dollar and the US economy he joins the ranks of supermodels, billionaire investors and sovereign wealth funds!

But there’s significant conflict of interest. Rather than spending $2 Billion a week in Iraq, if the government was spending that money on infrastructure development we might have a better economy. A stronger economy wouldn’t need this rate cuts and government deficits wouldn’t be in the trillions of dollars. This might have conceivably led to a stronger dollar.

Instead we have a dollar that is the weakest its ever been. For the first time in history, the Swiss frank is stronger than the US dollar. Most foreign currencies have appreciated considerably against the dollar over the past 2 years and I don’t see any signs of this trend reversing.

So are you going to follow the leader and bail on US investments too? Or are you going to stick your guns and weather the storm?