As the bottom falls out of the dollar, and people’s cash goes up in a mushroom cloud of smoke, someone’s going to make a lot of money… from foreign currencies

I’m reading all the front pages this morning, and I’m seeing nothing but fear:

Bloodbath
Global Rout
Panic Selling
Roller Coaster

It’s enough to make seasoned brokers and pit traders jump out of windows, not to mention the folks who’ve watched their retirement funds lose $2 trillion (over the past year and a half). It is truly a global market meltdown.

And it would seem that there’s no safe place to run anymore. Even commodities are flopping like a fish out of water.

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Okay, folks, here’s the chronology of the US dollar (versus the euro) over the last five days…

September 11: Dollar climbs throughout the day, but ends only slightly up at 0.7145.
September 12: Dollar starts a massive two-day slide, dropping from 0.7144 to end at 0.7034.
September 14: Dollar starts falling again, but suddenly shows a sharp correction higher, moving from a low of 0.6919 to a high of 0.7034.
September 15: Dollar swings wildly, but ends only slightly down at 0.7019.
September 16: Dollar oscillates, but is trending higher back above 0.7050

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I have to confess that before I tallied the results this week, I approached the task with an awful sense of dread. Everywhere you turn the news grows worse by the day. The U.S. economy is now being compared with the Great Depression. That’s depressing.

News about sinking markets in Asia didn’t help either. The ALL ORDINARIES IDX (ASX: ^AORD) Australia, the SSE Composite Index (Shanghai: 000001.SS) Shanghai and the ISHARES MSCI THAILAN (NYSEArca: THD) Thailand indices have been some of our best performers.

And even though I monitor the Taipan Emerging Market Index on a regular basis, the volatility of the global markets lately has been ferocious. You can check it in the morning and then at the close of the day, and any rational person could easily believe that the world had gone stark, raving mad in just a few short hours.

Well, call me lucky if you want, but the Taipan Emerging Market index closed out the day with a gain of 5%.

True enough the major markets in the U.S. closed up yesterday. The Dow rose 0.73%, the S&P 500 gain 0.70% and Nasdaq was up 1.03%. Still, even if you ad together those increases the Taipan Emerging Market index clearly did better than all of them combined.

Once again, our biggest winner this week was ISHARES MSCI THAILAN (NYSEArca: THD) Thailand. To find out why, please check out the Friday Snapshot of 6/27. A lot of Western manufacturing companies are moving into Thailand — including some who now believe that China it too expensive to meet their needs.

Well, this certainly is a terrific Friday, and tonight I’ll raise a brew for all of us. Have a great weekend.

–Irwin Greenstein