Isn't the overvalued dollar a significant advantage to the financial industry as well as to those corporations that choose to manufacture offshore?

It seems to me that an overvalued dollar enables Goldman Sachs and other investment bankers to buy foreign assets at a discount and an advantage in finance foreign manufacturers that produce goods for import into the US market. The overvalued dollar gives manufacturing firms that choose to offshore production an opportunity to purchase production equipment and facilities at a discount.

President Obama is a vassal of the Corporate Party of America and both his actions and silence on the overvalued dollar indicate his allegiance to the investment banking industry. The inherent conflict between investment banking firms and corporations that choose to offshore production and manufacturing firms that choose to manufacture their products domestically is just an intra-party struggle.

To believe that this year's state of the union speech signifies a turn toward populism is just a willful suspension of disbelief.

The SOTU is a political speech and the incentive is to help him win elections, I think the politics of dollar it are such that no President can talk about general weakening of the without coming out with political losses. Especially for Democrats both Wall Street and the D.C. Media Village elite would have hysterics if the President tried to talk down the dollar the way Jimmy Carter, and for that matter Ronald Reagan did (see Plaza Accords, 1985). Also, I don't see how God almighty, little lone the President, could strengthen the dollar against the Euro, a currency that might not exist in 12 months. Meanwhile, the dollar has continue to weaken against the Yen as the Administration quietly and benignly looks on. The President and Treasury can keep pushing publicly for the Chinese to unpeg the Reminbi from the Dollar and go for full convertibility, so at least those making investment decisions realize that real wages and costs in the U.S., as priced in dollars, will be declining slowly and steadily against China's wages and costs as measured in dollars. Dan Alpert in at economonitor makes an interesting point that the overall problem facing the U.S. and Europe is that we are turning Japanese, with a steady deflation in the wages of workers in manufacturing and services directly exposed to competiton from all those workers in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Vietnam, India, Bangladash, Thailand, Phillipines, and Indonesia coming into the world market. And this deflationary pressure on wages will keep both demand and inflation down no matter how many dollars the Fed prints or the Federal Government borrows. We are all turning Japanese!

The over-valued dollar and exchange rates can only be talked about in quiet places like Bain's break room.

He can't bring it down. China won't let him -- and it might wreck their economy if he did, with unpredictable consequences in Asia. Bold Obama is not.

"The US is the biggest source of China's foreign investment. Statistics show that by the end of November, the US had more than 60,000 investment projects in China with an input totaling $67.4 billion.

"Capital and technology from the US have played a positive role in China's reform and opening up. The two economies are so closely interconnected that neither one can leave the other," Xie said.

According to Xie, the yuan has appreciated by 30 percent against the dollar since July 2005, while between 2005 and 2011 the unemployment rate in the US has been increasing."

http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/us/2012-01/21/content_14487666.htm

Are Chinese economists any better?

"If President Obama were serious..."

Ay, there's the rub.

In the article you link to, Dean, Friedman actually uses the phrase "quantum advances," which is meaningless or at least doesn't mean what he thinks it does. Obviously, Thomas Friedman has risen to his level of incompetence. Can't somebody stop him from doing this stuff in public? It's obscene!

The euro is bouncing between $ 1.27 and $ 1.31. If the dollar is overvalued, then what could possibly be said of the euro? Ultra-hyper-super-overvalued?

The renminbi is undervalued. Absolutely! That does not make the dollar overvalued.

Up to this point -

"If President Obama were serious about increasing U.S. employment in manufactured then it would be expected that he would say something about the over-valued dollar and his plans to bring it down."

- you had a pretty even-handed point going. This point, however, is nonsense. Apparently, you really WANT Obama to do something to weaken the dollar, but that is a very different thing from what you've said. President Obama, in the case as in others, is dealing with the realm of the possible. It's not clear he has any direct tools for manipulating the FX value of the dollar. Yes, he can tell Geithner to tell Bernanke to sell dollars on the open market, but there is serious question whether sterilized intervention actually changes the FX value of the dollar over a period relevant to the pricing of internationally traded goods. The Fed has the tools to move the dollar, and has used them strenuously. The results are what you see.

So the question that pops up, to anyone who is serious in considering policy questions in something other than a politics-free vacuum, is whether Obama thinks the political and diplomatic cost of trying to talk the dollar down (again, since he has been doing so relative to the yuan since he took office) is worth the likely benefit. To suggest he is not serious about boosting factory employment simply because he has not said what you would like him to say is silly. There is a lot of silliness along those lines here. So, to adopt the tone our host seems to favor, "If our host were serious about objectively critiquing the economic policies of the President, we would expect him to strive for an objectivity and balance that is often missing from his writing."