Yes, we can say that. As what has been stated here, the number of newly minted coins dropped dramatically due to different factors (such as the difficulty increase and whatnot). We can fairly say that the price fluctuations recently are caused by some badass traders and intelligent market manipulators, or I could be wrong. Either way, the miners don't have much impact on the exchange rates in the current time frame.
The number of newly minted coins does not change with difficulty. The difficulty could be 1, it could be a zillion, but every 10 minutes a block will be found, and the reward amount (currently 25btc+transaction fees) will be distributed to miners.
It's true that the payout halved a year or two ago and will halve again in another year, but that's not quite relevant to the last 6 months or so.
The basic problem is simple: If it costs more in electricity to mine a bitcoin than the bitcoin is worth then it is economically stupid to mine. This is not a "we can't meet capital expenses" it's "we can't meet the most variable operating expense". It is completely and utterly illogical to mine when the value of bitcoin produced is less than the electricity to mine it. You're just digging a deeper hole, not minimizing your losses (which is at least the rationale in a dollar auction game).
Now if you expect miners to mine for your personal benefit to an arbitrary level of security, then fuck yourself and pay the transaction values of the service so that the miners will mine. If not the number of miners in the pool will drop, the difficulty will adjust down, the network will become less secure, to a point where mining is profitable again.
The trick in the above paragraph is (no, not fuck you :-) the level of "security". If the network dwindled down to one girl mining, it would still confirm blocks every 10 minutes, but that miner could screw with the network at will. Reverse transactions, fuck with the world, drive you crazy. You want more than one miner, so the price of bitcoin either needs to go up to the point where other miners hop in or transaction fees need to go up to the point where mining becomes more profitable.
Right now in my opinion the network is secure enough with all these miners, it would be secure enough with half of them. But what if half the miners idled their equipment and difficulty dropped 50%? That would be great, but the mining equipment idled still exists. Someone could harness that, offer a dump truck full of bitcoin to those idle miners and do a 51% attack on the chain.
Oops. That's a problem, isn't it. A Queen's race one can't slow down from without threatening the whole block chain.
Hm.
