Our designer, Thord Hedengren, writing in 901am, complains about the low value of the dollar. How would that affect him? Because like many people plying their trade on the internet he’s paid in dollars but lives outside the U.S.

He complains : “So I’m looking at my Paypal account and realize I won’t be moving any money anytime soon. The dollar’s down, has been for quite some time, and that means us non-US people make less for the same work.”

Currently, there are two dollars to every GB pound and, since a pound buys very roughly what a dollar buys in the States, it means we at Syntagma Media receive something like half the fee that an American company picks up, even when we are paid at the same rate.

Of course, it would work to our advantage if we were paid in sterling while our outgoings were designated in dollars. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. The internet is part of the dollar zone and will continue to be.

Thord goes on : “I lost equivalent of a grand (perhaps more when you read this, or less, depending on how the dollar moves compared to the Swedish crown) recently, just due to the dollar being down.”

Now I don’t know what the value of the Swedish Kroner is off-hand, but if it’s anything like the euro, he could be in an even worse situation than we British are.

The American economy is still chuntering along, despite a mammoth overseas trade deficit which is driving the dollar value down and making American goods and services cheaper for us abroad. This corrective mechanism clearly hasn’t gone far enough. Mostly this is due to Americans buying cheap Chinese goods — and who can blame them. The Chinese dollar surplus is then invested back into dollar assets on Wall Street. So the stock market moves up and cheap goods flood in. Everyone’s happy.

Except us worldwide writers and content providers who live in parts of Europe and get paid in dollars.