Tag Archives: reserve currency

While at the New Orleans Investment Conference this past weekend, Chris and I had the great pleasure of sitting down with Grant Williams, publisher of the economic blog Things That Make You Go Hmmm and principal of Real Vision TV.

There will be no smooth transition back to sustained economic growth, he warns

Instead, the distortion of today’s excessive asset prices will require a systemic reset to fix. Either by a deflationary event that destroys the malinvestment, or by an inflationary event that destroys the currency.

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Permanent impairment of capital is the cardinal sin of investing.

Well, today's markets present a clear and present danger of coming capital impairment for those who don't take prudent action in advance of a market downturn. Don't be guilty of inaction.

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Capital migrates to where it flows with the least resistance, i.e. to forms of capital that are liquid and offer low transaction costs—what I call ease of flow. Capital also migrates to relatively safe havens that are liquid and offer low transaction/holding costs, and to forms of capital with global utility. And it also flows to the highest yield/return with the lowest perceived risk.

Given these fundamentals, it isn’t difficult to understand why capital is flowing into USD-denominated assets and bitcoin.

So what do the fundamentals suggest about the valuation uptrends in the USD and bitcoin? Have they topped out and due for a crash, or have they just started their appreciation cycle?

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Gold has been in a bear market for three years. Technical analysts are asking themselves whether they should call an end to this slump on the basis of the "triple-bottom" recently made at $1180/oz, or if they should be wary of a coming downside break beneath that level. The purpose of this article is to look at the drivers of the gold price and explain why today's market value is badly reflective of gold's true worth.

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I have long been a dollar bull, not for any over-arching reasons based on inflation, deflation, rising geopolitical multi-polarity or any of the other issues that touch on the dollar’s valuation vis-à-vis other currencies. My analysis focuses on a few basics:  the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency, Triffin’s Paradox (a.k.a. Triffin’s Dilemma) and global capital flows into the dollar and dollar-denominated assets such as U.S. Treasury bonds.

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Looking at the past 100 years of the US dollar's history, one theme becomes abundantly clear: in times of crisis, the US government has no issue with changing its own rules or breaking its own laws. And those "temporary" emergency measures have a nasty habit of quickly becoming permanent.

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The US is clearly now pushing Russia towards war. But if you read the signs correctly, Russia has been preparing for exactly this outcome for many years.

Out of several reasons that US power brokers specifically — but western power brokers more generally — are deeply unhappy with Russia right now is that Russia is committing a cardinal sin: it is openly, brazenly calling for an end to dollar dominance and has moved aggressively with China to achieve that aim.

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Though the mainstream financial media and the blogosphere differ radically on their forecasts—the MFM sees near-zero systemic risk while the alternative media sees a critical confluence of it—they agree on one thing: the Federal Reserve and the “too big to fail” (TBTF) Wall Street banks have their hands on the political and financial tiller of the nation, and nothing will dislodge their dominance.

But what id Wall Street’s power has peaked and is about to be challenged by forces that it has never faced before? Put another way,what if the power of Wall Street has reached a systemic extreme where a decline or reversal is inevitable?

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Jim Rickards, author of the best-seller Currency Wars, sees the world's central banks embroiled in a "race to debase" their currencies in order to restore – at any cost – growth to their weakened economies.

In the midst of the fight, the U.S. Federal Reserve wields oversized power due to the dollar's unique position as the global reserve currency. As a result, actions by the Fed create huge percussive ripples across the battlefield, often influencing events in ways little understood by the players – and especially by the Fed itself.

In Rickards' words, the policymakers at the Fed "think they are dialing a thermostat up and down, but they're actually playing with a nuclear reactor – and they could melt the whole thing down":

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