NEW YORK (Reuters) – Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Wednesday the U.S. dollar will remain the world’s reserve currency for a long time, though he expressed openness to expanded use of an IMF currency basket.
The U.S. dollar tumbled after Geithner told policy-makers and business executives at the Council on Foreign Relations that he was “quite open” to a Chinese suggestion to move toward greater use of an IMF-created global currency basket comprising dollar, euros, sterling and yen.
Prompted by the moderator to clarify his position, Geithner said: “The dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve currency and I think that’s likely to continue for a long period of time.”
“As a country, we will do what’s necessary to make sure we’re sustaining confidence in our financial markets and in this economy’s long-term fundamentals,” he added.
Earlier this week, Chinese central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan, said the world should consider using the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket as a super-sovereign reserve currency.
Geithner said he hadn’t read Zhou’s proposal, but added, “as I understand it, it’s a proposal designed to increase the use of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights. I am actually quite open to that suggestion.”
“But you should think of it as rather evolutionary, building on the current architecture, than rather than moving us to global monetary union.”
China’s foreign exchange reserves are the largest in the world at nearly $2 trillion and China is the biggest holder of U.S. Treasury debt.
The dollar initially fell against the euro on reports of Geithner’s remarks, but pared losses he reiterated his faith in the dollar as world reserve currency.
“Geithner admits to not having read China’s proposal, and President Obama’s comments on the dollar yesterday — no need for another reserve currency and that the dollar was fundamentally strong — was more of the underlying signal,” said Marc Chandler, senior currency strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman in New York.
Senior Obama adviser Paul Volcker also said on Wednesday a Chinese suggestion to move toward a world currency system linked to the IMF’s SDRs was not practical.
“I understand restiveness about the lopsided nature of the present international monetary system that’s so dependent on the dollar,” Volcker said at a panel with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at New York University.
But Volcker said when China questioned the dollar’s role as the world reserve currency, “They ignore the fact that they didn’t have to buy those dollars in the first place so they contributed to the problem.
FOREIGN APPETITE STRONG
Speaking on CNBC television later Wednesday, Geithner underscored his desire to see a strong dollar.
“I want to say this very clearly, a strong dollar is in America’s interest. We are going to make sure to pursue policies that improve the long-term fundamentals of the U.S. economy,” he said. Geithner also said there was “no evidence” foreign investors were losing interest in buy U.S. debt.
He also told CNBC there were signs the government’s efforts to support the economy and stabilize the financial sector were beginning to bear fruit, with the “pace of deterioration” slowing in some areas.
Geithner said in the interview that he was committed to putting the funds remaining in the Treasury $700 billion financial rescue program to work quickly and efficiently, and he held the door open to asking Congress for more.
“We always said this crisis may require more resources to deal with effectively, and we’re going to make sure we work with the Congress over time so that we can do this on a scale that is going to bring recovery back as soon as possible,” he said.
Geithner played down the idea that there was a sharp division between the United States and Europe over the amount of fiscal stimulus need to combat the global downturn.
“I think there is more commitment to a greater level of stimulus across the major economies than we’ve ever seen,” he said.
Scrap dollar as sole reserve currency: U.N. report
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) – A new United Nations report released on Tuesday calls for abandoning the U.S. dollar as the main global reserve currency, saying it has been unable to safeguard value.
But several European officials attending a high-level meeting of the U.N. Economic and Social Council countered by saying that the market, not politicians, would determine what currencies countries would keep on hand for reserves.
“The dollar has proved not to be a stable store of value, which is a requisite for a stable reserve currency,” the U.N. World Economic and Social Survey 2010 said.
The report says that developing countries have been hit by the U.S. dollar’s loss of value in recent years.
“Motivated in part by needs for self-insurance against volatility in commodity markets and capital flows, many developing countries accumulated vast amounts of such (U.S. dollar) reserves during the 2000s,” it said.
The report supports replacing the dollar with the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights (SDRs), an international reserve asset that is used as a unit of payment on IMF loans and is made up of a basket of currencies.
“A new global reserve system could be created, one that no longer relies on the United States dollar as the single major reserve currency,” the U.N. report said.
The report said a new reserve system “must not be based on a single currency or even multiple national currencies but instead, should permit the emission of international liquidity — such as SDRs — to create a more stable global financial system.”
“Such emissions of international liquidity could also underpin the financing of investment in long-term sustainable development,” it said.
MARKETS DECIDE
Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a Malaysian economist and the U.N. assistant secretary general for economic development, told a news conference that “there’s going to be resistance” to the idea.
“In the whole post-war period, we’ve essentially had a dollar-based system,” he said, adding that the gradual emission of SDRs could help countries phase out the dollar.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who previously chaired a U.N. expert commission that considered ways of overhauling the global financial system, has advocated the creation of a new reserve currency system, possibly based on SDRs.
Russia and China have also supported the idea.
But Paavo Vayrynen, Finland’s Foreign Trade and Development Minister, told reporters that he doubted it was possible “to make any political or administrative decisions how to formulate the currency system in the world.”
“It is based on the markets,” he said. “I believe that the economic players in the market are going to have the decisive influence on that issue.”
European Union development commissioner Andris Piebalgs said it would be a bad idea to dictate what the reserve currency should be.
“It is markets that decide,” he said. “Any intervention would just create additional challenges and make things even less predictable.”
How would the US react to the collapse of the Petro-dollar system?
If the petrodollar collapsed, the entire world would collapse with it into an economic crisis worse than the Great Depression. For a while.
A little history:
In the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, the US dollar was tied to gold at a fixed rate of 35 dollars per troy ounce of gold. This made the dollar very attractive as a reserve currency for many countries and created an artificial demand for dollars that allowed the US to print out money without it resulting in inflation. At one point the US held about 80% of the world’s gold reserves.
However, the US has a history for being bad at balancing budgets. In 1971, near the end of the Vietnam War, the US had a massive fiscal deficit. In the same way you fear for your money if your bank is making bad investments, countries who had their reserves in dollars started to feel uneasy with the way the US was spending (or printing money). They started buying back gold with the dollars they had, the equivalent of a bank run. The US realized it didn’t have enough gold reserves to cover the massive amounts of money they had printed out (like a fractional reserve bank), and so they unilaterally decided to let the dollar float in what is now called the Nixon Shock. It was a virtual default. Since then, the USD has lost more than 30 times its purchasing power relative to gold.
Without gold backing the dollar, demand for dollars would have collapsed. In fact, for a while, the “oil shocks” that resulted from Nixon’s decision caused considerable economic instability and inflation. The US had to figure out a way to stabilize and solidify the dollar.
So, how did they do it?
First, a deal was struck with Saudi Arabia, by far the biggest producer of crude oil in the 70s, that required them to sell their oil exclusively in US dollars. In exchange, the US offered the Saudis weapons and protection, something they readily accepted given the Middle East’s propencity to military conflict (in part exacerbated by the US itself). And thus the petrodollar was born. The idea was to make the global oil trade depend on the dollar, creating the demand needed to prevent too much inflation.
It was certainly easier for everyone (even if you had your differences with the US) to trade oil in US dollars, because it made markets more accessible, competitive and transparent. Soon after the Saudi deal, the entire world was trading oil in dollars, even the USSR. But it gave the US a massive amount of control, and since then the US has defended this fiercely with military force and political scheming. Recently, Gaddafi and Saddam tried to challenge the petrodollar, and the US immediately gave them a good dose of “democracy”. Saddam was falsely accused of having WMDs. They didn’t even bother to make up a good story for Gaddafi, and simply said he was an evil, corrupt despot (which he incidentally was). They’re both dead now. Al Qaeda and ISIS are both the result of the US funding proxy wars to topple governments they wanted to control. Just a few examples.
The US is the middle-man for the most lucrative trade in the world and much of its prosperity depends on keeping it so. With a high demand for dollars, they keep inflation under control, because all countries subsidize the growing money supply when they buy oil. It has worked brilliantly. The US has issued debt like crazy (and let’s not even mention the fact that the FED is a private institution), and despite this has had super cheap debt, because everyone wants those precious dollars to buy oil.
This has gone on for over 40 years now. 40 years of continuous fiscal deficits, military intervention in the Middle East (Iraq 2x, Libya, Syria, etc), artificially cheap debt, and a manufactured demand for dollars. All financed by the entire world’s consumption of oil.
Meanwhile, globalization has made the dollar the cornerstone of not only the oil industry, but virtually everything else, particularly the financial industry.
But make no mistake: the dollar itself is the biggest economic bubble there’s ever been. There is a massively corrupt and greedy element of geopolitical control in the dollar, rotten to the core. That greed is ultimately, I think, the biggest source of hate, sorrow and war in today’s world.
And yes: were it to suddenly collapse, it would be a disaster. The dollar supply would far and away exceed demand, resulting in high inflation. Everyone all around the world would scramble to get rid of their dollar reserves. And since everything, everywhere is connected to the dollar, it would be a catastrophe. It would all have to start with the US losing control of the oil markets.
It’s already happening now, to some extent. We’ve seen many instances where the US just can’t deal with the economic and political threats through military intervention as it did in the past:
- China and Russia are pushing towards a non-US dollar oil market. China already has plans for a gold-backed oil futures contract in yuan. Basically, China will do what the US was doing pre-Nixon, and that’s what made everyone want to buy dollars at the time. It’s already being called a “game changer” for the oil industry. It is by far the biggest threat to the petro-dollar right now, and the US is powerless to stop it.
- The Syria affair, one of the biggest screw ups in foreign policy history. Aside from that one, the US has a massive PR issue in the Middle East in general.
- Venezuela is collapsing and it seems Russia and China are ready for scavenging.
Times have changed. Today, even piss-poor countries like North Korea can force the US into submission, by threatening to fire a ballistic missile across the world and flatten an entire city. The world has become too unstable to use force as an effective foreign policy instrument.
A complete collapse of the petrodollar can’t happen overnight, though, because the dollar is backed by not just oil, but the world’s biggest economy. It also wouldn’t be a complete collapse, because the US itself is one of the biggest oil producers in the world, so a big chunk of trading will always be done in US dollars.
But a decline will gradually happen. The US government is running the biggest ponzi scheme in history and in doing so is keeping the entire world’s economy hostage to the privately owned FED. Since 2008, the US printed about 3 trillion dollars in their “quantitative easing” program, quadrupling the FED’s reserves. But China, Europe and Russia all want a piece of the pie and are fighting for it. In fact, I think the entire world is a little bit fed up with the whole thing too, especially in Europe, where the monumental cluster f**k that is the Middle East has resulted in serious demographic problems that aren’t on some remote corner of the world anymore… They are at their doorstep.
A Multipolar Reserve Currrency: US Dollar Alternatives
14:58if you’re looking ahead of the elections15:00do you think that the outcome of the15:01elections either way15:03would influence foreign policy going15:05forward and as a result15:07foreign countries decisions to hold more15:09or less gold15:11absolutely i mean we’re working on a15:13report right now15:15on the implications of the election for15:17for gold and precious metals15:19uh and you have like four different15:22scenarios on how things15:23shake out but definitely i mean you know15:26this15:27administration has um15:30excelled in its ability to reduce the us15:34stature around the world15:36and to create hostile relationships with15:39countries around the world15:41it’s had a negative effect on cpm group15:43because15:44there are people who don’t want to deal15:46with u.s companies15:49and and so i think a change in the15:51administration15:53while it wouldn’t be a 180 degrees turn15:55because15:56there are people in the democratic party15:58including joe biden15:59who will probably retake retain would16:02retain16:03some sort of hostile posture toward16:06china16:06it may be less hostile than the current16:09one and it may be less hostile toward16:11canada16:12and and other countries around the world16:15so you should see16:17if you saw a change in the16:18administration and a change in the16:20senate16:20you should see some improvement in the16:23u.s relations with16:25the rest of the world but there’s been a16:27tremendous amount of damage16:30done to the u.s stature globally16:34and it’s probably not going to get16:36changed by one16:37by a change of government for four years16:40do you think the us dollar then going16:42forward could lose its status as a de16:45facto reserve currency of the world16:47because you see another currency16:49challenging that status16:51as i said the part of the problem is16:53that the u.s owes the world so much16:55it owns it we have 62 percent of16:58monetary reserves17:01the u.s dollar will lose its stature17:04as the reserve currency in the future17:08the future may be 50 years from now and17:12it is it not it is reversible17:15this could not happen if the u.s17:18government got its act together but i17:19have17:20no hopes for that well if the u.s if the17:23u.s loses that status17:24who’s what’s going to take over who or17:26what well i was getting to that17:28as i said earlier most central banks in17:31the world17:32see as an ideal a multi-polar17:36international currency regime they17:38understand that it will take17:40decades to get there because of the17:42imbalance and liquidity between the17:44dollar and17:44all of the other currencies in the world17:47yeah17:4862 percent of their money of their forex17:51is in dollars that means that there’s17:53only 38 percent and everything else17:55they have to slowly make that transition17:58away17:59no government wants to see18:02its currency replace the dollar as the18:05reserve currency18:06what they’d like to see is a multi-polar18:09international currency regime18:11where people are free and companies and18:14governments are free18:15and there’s sufficient liquidity in18:17non-dollar currencies18:19that you can own and hold a portion of18:22your wealth18:24in those other currencies a greater18:26proportion of it18:27no one like if you talk to the chinese18:29central bankers if you talk to18:31other central bankers in around the18:34world18:34no one expects the dollar to disappear18:37as a18:38quote de facto reserve currency18:41but they‘d like to see it disappear as18:43the de facto current18:45reserve currency but they’re fully aware18:48that this is something that’s going to18:50take decades to execute18:52if it can be done okay you brought up18:55china i’m surprised to see that china18:57was relatively low on the list18:59when you’re talking about their19:00percentage of foreign reserves19:02in gold holdings it’s only four percent19:04of the foreign reserves in gold19:06are you surprised at how low that number19:08is19:09no um i’m not surprised i19:12i should ask you why you’re surprised19:14that it’s high19:15but you know china that should the19:18people’s bank of china for19:20decades had a view that gold was a small19:22and insignificant portion of its19:24monetary reserves19:26it changed that view in 2015 at a time19:29when it rolled out19:30a massive acceleration of19:33its efforts to make the rmb19:37more of an international currency it’s19:39still not you know fully convertible19:41but they expanded the daily trading19:43ranges and they expanded the longer term19:45trading ranges that they found19:47acceptable on the rmb19:49they started encouraging rmb19:52bonds offshore being issued offshore19:56and they said okay we’re adding some19:59gold to our reserves and we’re going to20:01continue to buy gold because20:02we see gold as a small but significant20:05part of our monetary reserve policy20:08going forward20:08now this was in 2015 and it’s very20:11important to understand that that was20:13after 2008 and 2009 when the u.s20:16treasury20:17basically stuffed everybody else and20:20protected20:21the bankers or the executives at the20:23banks uh20:24in the us and and so this was a direct20:27reaction20:28to the inappropriate behavior that the20:31us20:32treasury had during the financial the20:34global financial crisis20:36uh and and the chinese central bank20:39basically said we have to accelerate our20:41effort20:42to help move toward that multi-polar20:45currency20:46regime that we all would like to see in20:48the long run20:50uh and so they started adding their goal20:52if you go back to 201520:54they probably had about 1.1 1.3 percent20:58of their reserves in gold so the fact21:01that it’s up to four percent21:02and the fact that they have like three21:04trillion dollars of dollar reserve21:06of of foreign exchange reserves means21:08that it’s going to be a slow transition21:10as they add gold to it and as i said21:12they’re very price sensitive21:14they pulled out of buying gold for about21:1615 months a few years ago21:18then they came back and they were buying21:20but then they pulled back at the end of21:22201921:23and they haven’t reappeared they said21:25you know in the past they said21:27we’ll buy gold below a thousand when21:29gold went over a thousand they21:31didn’t buy any gold for several years21:33then they increased their threshold21:35and they knew they were buying uh and21:37then when the price started rising this21:39year they said no21:40you know we’re going to wait finally21:41jeff with everything that’s happened21:43this year and in particular with the um21:46central bank activity or slowdown of21:48central bank buying activity21:49do you think the run-up of gold prices21:52to two thousand dollars21:53all-time highs has made sense to you do21:55you think valuations are21:57correct as they should be right now yeah22:00i think they are22:01uh you know obviously the trend of the22:04next year or two is going to depend on22:06several things the outcome of the us22:08elections for the senate as well as the22:10presidency22:11brexit is coming up the pandemic which22:14is getting worse in europe now and is22:16expected to get much worse in the united22:18states22:18there are a lot of negative factors22:20there uh that fully support the idea of22:23a two thousand dollar22:24gold price now i wouldn’t be surprised22:27to see the price of gold22:28spike up higher on a short-term basis uh22:31then maybe plateau depending on what22:33happens politically22:35uh but we expect higher prices later22:37like22:382023 2025 because22:41none of these things are being solved22:43would you have a long-term price target22:45in mind22:47we’re looking at a gold price that is22:50very significantly higher than it is22:53today22:54all right perfect jeff jeff i want to22:57thank you so much for uh speaking with22:58me today that was a fascinating talk23:00thank you for your time thank you for23:02your time23:03and thank you for watching kiko news23:05we’ll have much more coverage for you23:06at the denver gold form stay tuned23:34you