Despite the prospect of a more than doubling of the U.S. annual budget deficit for each of the next two years, the dollar has held up reasonably well so far against the world's other major currencies, actually rising against the euro and British pound, while falling against Japan's yen.

But a commodities guru says that won't last.

Commodities expert Jim Rogers says U.S. policy makers will devalue the dollar, undercutting the greenback's reserve currency status, according to Bloomberg News.

"They think that if you drive down the value of your money, it makes you more competitive, now that has never worked in history in the long term," Rogers said. He added that he is buying Japan's yen and started buying commodities, such as sugar, in October, calling low commodity prices "astonishing." (For full currency data, click here.)

Still, despite Rogers' superior performance predicting commodity cycles -- in 2006 he correctly predicted that oil would hit $100 and gold $1,000 -- not every economist is in agreement with his dollar devaluation thesis. Economist David H. Wang said that while the dollar will likely decline in value some, due to increased U.S. government borrowing, that does not guarantee a decrease in U.S. competitiveness.

Every dark cloud has a distress sale. That's the old saying, isn't it? Well, perhaps things look pretty bad for the mortgage industry, but I can guarantee you one thing. Real estate investors are eagerly awaiting for the dust to settle so they can pounce on distressed properties which will need to be liquidated for pennies on the dollar. I can hear them drooling from here.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but last time I checked, commercial banks aren't especially fond of holding title to single family dwellings. Given the possibility that nearly 2 million homes are slated for foreclosure in the next year, that could make for a lot of motivated selling. Many of those distressed homes are in highly desirable areas and I'm sure that there will be plenty of duplexes and quad unit apartment buildings caught up in the fray. The board rooms of large real estate holding companies must feel like war rooms right about now.

If you would like to get a feel for our government's official position on the matter, have a look at The Real Estate Realist. You will find insight there into what has been officially declared by the Joint Economic Committee as its position on the matter. The committee press release, peppered with words such as loss, destroyed and catastrophe, does little to ease national concerns about a real estate scene in flux. In fact, what I read of the release could be characterized as an astounding declaration of the obvious. I will concede however that the report did make nice use of a tsunami metaphor.

If you have a lump of cash that you'd like to invest in something that you can set your feet on, now is the time to begin your research. It's time to begin surveying the field but don't be too eager to move in for the kill just yet. The massive real estate devaluation that seems to be impending has not yet gotten up to speed. I have a feeling that there will be absolutely astounding regional real estate bargains beginning to surface going into the second quarter of 2008 as cash strapped banks scramble to unload real estate they have no desire to hold on to.

The questions are beginning to swirl about Skype's future as a property of eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) I for one think it's high time for Meg Whitman and crew to put that lumbering ox on the butcher's block. The latest in a long painful series of failures and foibles for the once overpriced Skype VOIP system is eBay's recent scolding of some of it's members for placing Jajah telephony buttons within their item listings to effectively allow the member to member communications which Skype was at one time slated to accomplish.
A report by Stuart Corner of itWire states that, "According to Jajah, eBay has informed some of its users that placing Jajah Buttons on offers within the eBay marketplace is not allowed." Apparently Jajah buttons violate a long standing eBay policy against links to live chat systems. Free communication among eBay members is discouraged. Jajah co-founder Daniel Mattes, said: "We will work on behalf of our users to ask eBay to reconsider." I'm afraid to say that if eBay frowns upon Google shirts at their eBay live event, they'll probably continue to stand in the way of Jajah buttons in their item listings also.

A recent Bloggingstocks post by Beth Gaston Moon points towards a brighter future for Skype based on the words of Meg Whitman. I suppose anything is possible but this blogger thinks that if eBay doesn't unload Skype and do it quickly, they will be stuck with the world's largest pink elephant ever. For now at least, someone with some communications savvy could take hold of Skype and still mold it into something with some mentionable growth potential. As eBay clings willfully to Skype, technology threatens to overtake Skype dead in it's tracks in the hands of a management team which is in need of circumspect evaluation. Some people might want you to think that Skype's revenue increase of 96% year over year is something to crow about but if you recall, for the last two years previous, Skype did about nothing for eBay's bottom line and a 96% increase of nothing isn't much.

While it is being reported the Fed Not Expected to Change Key Rate from the 5.25% level it has maintained for over a year now, I feel that eventually Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and fellow Board members might have no choice but to raise rates.

Yes, that would hurt the housing industry further and other major sectors of the economy would feel the pinch. Naturally, this would affect corporate earnings and the stock market too. The Fed is the self-proclaimed inflation hawk that has made its priorities well known. However, if other countries raise their rates (as they have been), we may have no choice but to follow suit. If we do not, then we will have to print money to make up for the lack of borrowing power via treasury notes. While both borrowing and running the printing presses are inflationary, the latter solution is more so in the short term, because with notes the government only prints money to pay the interest on the debt.

According to an article published on June 15 by the Economic Policy Institute entitled U.S. current account deficits contributing to surging long-term interest rates: