Reserve Currency

The American Empire has been long in the making. A green light was given in 1990 to finalize that goal. Dramatic events occurred that year that allowed the promoters of the American Empire to cheer. It also ushered in the current 25-year war to solidify the power necessary to manage a world empire. The day will come when we will be forced to give up our role as world policeman and resort to using a little common sense and come home. This will only occur when the American people realize that our presence around the world and the maintenance of our empire has nothing to do with defending our Constitution, preserving our liberties, or fulfilling some imaginary obligation on our part to use force to spread American exceptionalism. A thorough look at our economic conditions, our pending bankruptcy, our veterans hospitals, and how we’re viewed in the world by most other nations, will compel Americans to see things differently and insist that we bring our troops home – the sooner the better.

When things are this obviously crazy, anything is possible.

Last month the Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, Japan’s Naoyuki Shinohara, openly stated that emerging markets in Asia should begin the process of de-dollarisation “to mitigate against external shocks and constraining the central bank’s ability as lender of last resort.”

Following a year of threats that the west would kick Russia out of SWIFT, Moscow finally took the plunge and created its own international payment system alternative. And now, seeing how easy and fast it can be done, here comes China next with its own "China International Payment System" or CIPS, as one after another major global powers wave goodbye to a dollar-based, Washington-controlled (and NSA-supervised) international funds-transfer protocol. One that no longer relies on the US Dollar.

We need to look at the concept of a reserve currency differently, because it is important. We need to look at it as a privilege and a responsibility and not as a weapon we can use against the rest of the world. If we abolish, or even lessen, legal tender laws and allow the process of price discovery to reveal the best sound money, if we allow our US dollar to become the best money it can - a truly sound money - then the chances of our personal and collective prosperity are greatly enhanced. We all have the same interest. We all want to have the highest standard of living for ourselves and our families. A sound money reserve currency offers us the best chance of achieving our shared goal; therefore, we should rally around every effort to make it so.

When we arrived to Bangkok the other day, coming down the motorway from the airport we saw a huge billboard - and it floored us. The billboard was from the Bank of China. It said: “RMB: New Choice; The World Currency”

Following the approval of the government, Kazakhstan's Central Bank has announced it plans to de-dollarize its economy by the end of 2016. The goal is to avoid the macroeconomic instability that the USD creates and to give priority to Tenge in trade agreements (banning price designations in foreign exchange). Coming just 2 weeks after the ratification of the $100 billion BRICS bank, and Russia's creation of a SWIFT-alternative, one wonders - as one by one foreign nations agree non-dollar trade and swap agreements - who is becoming 'isolated' now?

Financial collapse is already baked in, and it's only a matter of time before it happens, and precipitates commercial collapse when global supply chains stop functioning. Political collapse will be resisted, and the way it will be resisted is by starting as many wars as possible, to produce a vast backdrop of failure to serve as a rationale for all sorts of “emergency measures,” all of which will have just one aim: to suppress rebellion and to keep the oligarchy in power.

Echoing former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers’ quip, “There is surely something odd about the world’s greatest power being the world’s greatest debtor,” it appears that economic reality is finally beginning to set in for Americans... Only hours ago, Gallup released a new poll showing that only a small minority (just 17%) of Americans still view the US as the world’s economic superpower.

Never has our nation, corporations and wealthy top 1% faced so many new threats to their efforts to grow their power and wealth around the world.  But a real war would provide the crisis excuse to confiscate your gold and "excess" retirement plan and IRA assets, reduce or curtail your social security benefits, dramatically raise taxes and institute total exchange controls while curtailing your remaining freedoms and ability to resist for the duration of the crisis.

Financial markets are upside down.  Financial repression and belief in the “Fed put” pushed investors further and further out the risk curve over the past six years.  Too many asset managers have remained fearful of underperforming peers and benchmarks; a powerful incentive to stay ‘risked-up’.   The psychology of bullish, and faith in Fed abilities, have been too firmly embedded in the investor class. Given that markets don’t seem to want to believe that a June hike looks probable, we expect an outsized market reaction to a hike, lower long yields to accompany it, a flatter curve, wider credit spreads, higher market volatility, and materially lower equity markets.

Overnight we learned from Vice Admiral Joseph Mulloy, deputy chief of naval operations for capabilities and resources, who testified before the House Armed Services Committee's seapower subcommittee that China "is building some fairly amazing submarines and now has more diesel- and nuclear-powered vessels than the United States," “They may not be the same quality, but their submarine forces are growing at a tremendous rate. They now have more diesel and nuclear attack submarines than we have,” the admiral told the lawmakers. “They are producing some fairly amazing submarines and they are actually deploying them.”

Welcome to the second arms race.

The one chart which, both literally and metaphorically, will determine how much longer the USD will reign as the world's reserve, is the following.

As a frequent contributor to Bloomberg, I would welcome the opportunity to debate this with Barry.
What say you @ritholtz ?  : )

Financial repression "is going on on several fronts conducted by different people for their own agendas, though they all seem to be mutually supporting... There is a lot of collusion - the cancer which started in the US Financial System has spread globally... You now have two parties with the same head and reporting to the same masters. There is no longer any countervailing power."