I was talking to friend in New York City the other day about the current financial crisis, and she told me about a scene she had just witnessed in the lobby of the Warwick Hotel. Four Swedish tourists, who clearly had been on a shopping spree in Manhattan, fueled by the still cheap dollar, were trying to cram all their purchases into four suitcases. They had bought a hand-held scale  one of those you just grip onto the suitcase and lift  to make sure all their American goodies were not overweight for the flight home.

Another friend of mine in the ship-supply business in Baltimore, Alan Kotz, told me about a German customer who recently put in double his normal order. When Alan asked him if he was aware of how much he had ordered, the German brushed his question away and laughed: “Alan, nevermind, everything for us is half price.”

And a good thing it is. Even though the dollar has strengthened a bit lately, we are going to need foreigners and sovereign wealth funds from China, Asia, Europe and the Middle East more than ever to survive this crisis  and they are going to need us to be healthy as well. In the process, we are going to become even more intertwined and dependent on the rest of the world.

Sarah Palin won’t have to worry that she doesn’t know what the Bush doctrine is. No one really knew what it meant. But it had something to do with the unilateral exercise of American power, and the next president’s ability to act unilaterally on anything other than vital national security issues is going to be reduced. As the old saying goes: He who has the gold makes the rules. Well, we no longer have as much gold, and until we get some, we will have to pay more heed to the rules of those who lend us theirs.