WSJ ~ Requiem for the Dollar

Requiem for the Dollar

By JAMES GRANT

Illustration by WSJ; iStockphoto (3)


Ben S. Bernanke doesn't know how lucky he is. Tongue-lashings from Bernie Sanders, the populist senator from Vermont, are one thing. The hangman's noose is another. Section 19 of this country's founding monetary legislation, the Coinage Act of 1792, prescribed the death penalty for any official who fraudulently debased the people's money. Was the massive printing of dollar bills to lift Wall Street (and the rest of us, too) off the rocks last year a kind of fraud? If the U.S. Senate so determines, it may send Mr. Bernanke back home to Princeton. But not even Ron Paul, the Texas Republican sponsor of a bill to subject the Fed to periodic congressional audits, is calling for the Federal Reserve chairman's head.

I wonder, though, just how far we have really come in the past 200-odd years. To give modernity its due, the dollar has cut a swath in the world. There's no greater success story in the long history of money than the common greenback. Of no intrinsic value, collateralized by nothing, it passes from hand to trusting hand the world over. More than half of the $923 billion's worth of currency in circulation is in the possession of foreigners.

In ancient times, the solidus circulated far and wide. But it was a tangible thing, a gold coin struck by the Byzantine Empire. Between Waterloo and the Great Depression, the pound sterling ruled the roost. But it was convertible into gold—slip your bank notes through a teller's window and the Bank of England would return the appropriate number of gold sovereigns. The dollar is faith-based. There's nothing behind it but Congress.

But now the world is losing faith, as well it might. It's not that the dollar is overvalued—economists at Deutsche Bank estimate it's 20% too cheap against the euro. The problem lies with its management. The greenback is a glorious old brand that's looking more and more like General Motors.

You get the strong impression that Mr. Bernanke fails to appreciate the tenuousness of the situation—fails to understand that the pure paper dollar is a contrivance only 38 years old, brand new, really, and that the experiment may yet come to naught. Indeed, history and mathematics agree that it will certainly come to naught. Paper currencies are wasting assets. In time, they lose all their value. Persistent inflation at even seemingly trifling amounts adds up over the course of half a century. Before you know it, that bill in your wallet won't buy a pack of gum.

For most of this country's history, the dollar was exchangeable into gold or silver. "Sound" money was the kind that rang when you dropped it on a counter. For a long time, the rate of exchange was an ounce of gold for $20.67. Following the Roosevelt devaluation of 1933, the rate of exchange became an ounce of gold for $35. After 1933, only foreign governments and central banks were privileged to swap unwanted paper for gold, and most of these official institutions refrained from asking (after 1946, it seemed inadvisable to antagonize the very superpower that was standing between them and the Soviet Union). By the late 1960s, however, some of these overseas dollar holders, notably France, began to clamor for gold. They were well-advised to do so, dollars being in demonstrable surplus. President Richard Nixon solved that problem in August 1971 by suspending convertibility altogether. From that day to this, in the words of John Exter, Citibanker and monetary critic, a Federal Reserve "note" has been an "IOU nothing."

To understand the scrape we are in, it may help, a little, to understand the system we left behind. A proper gold standard was a well-oiled machine. The metal actually moved and, so moving, checked what are politely known today as "imbalances." Say a certain baseball-loving North American country were running a persistent trade deficit. Under the monetary system we don't have and which only a few are yet even talking about instituting, the deficit country would remit to its creditors not pieces of easily duplicable paper but scarce gold bars. Gold was money—is, in fact, still money—and the loss would set in train a series of painful but necessary adjustments in the country that had been watching baseball instead of making things to sell. Interest rates would rise in that deficit country. Its prices would fall, its credit would be curtailed, its exports would increase and its imports decrease. At length, the deficit country would be restored to something like competitive trim. The gold would come sailing back to where it started. As it is today, dollars are piled higher and higher in the vaults of America's Asian creditors. There's no adjustment mechanism, only recriminations and the first suggestion that, from the creditors' point of view, enough is enough.

So in 1971, the last remnants of the gold standard were erased. And a good thing, too, some economists maintain. The high starched collar of a gold standard prolonged the Great Depression, they charge; it would likely have deepened our Great Recession, too. Virtue's the thing for prosperity, they say; in times of trouble, give us the Ben S. Bernanke school of money conjuring. There are many troubles with this notion. For one thing, there is no single gold standard. The version in place in the 1920s, known as the gold-exchange standard, was almost as deeply flawed as the post-1971 paper-dollar system. As for the Great Recession, the Bernanke method itself was a leading cause of our troubles. Constrained by the discipline of a convertible currency, the U.S. would have had to undergo the salutary, unpleasant process described above to cure its trade deficit. But that process of correction would—I am going to speculate—have saved us from the near-death financial experience of 2008. Under a properly functioning gold standard, the U.S. would not have been able to borrow itself to the threshold of the poorhouse.

Anyway, starting in the early 1970s, American monetary policy came to resemble a game of tennis without the net. Relieved of the irksome inhibition of gold convertibility, the Fed could stop worrying about the French. To be sure, it still had Congress to answer to, and the financial markets, as well. But no more could foreigners come calling for the collateral behind the dollar, because there was none. The nets came down on Wall Street, too. As the idea took hold that the Fed could meet any serious crisis by carpeting the nation with dollar bills, bankers and brokers took more risks. New forms of business organization encouraged more borrowing. New inflationary vistas opened.

Not that the architects of the post-1971 game set out to lower the nets. They believed they'd put up new ones. In place of such gold discipline as remained under Bretton Woods—in truth, there wasn't much—markets would be the monetary judges and juries. The late Walter Wriston, onetime chairman of Citicorp, said that the world had traded up. In place of a gold standard, it now had an "information standard." Buyers and sellers of the Treasury's notes and bonds, on the one hand, or of dollars, yen, Deutschemarks, Swiss francs, on the other, would ride herd on the Fed. You'd know when the central bank went too far because bond yields would climb or the dollar exchange rate would fall. Gold would trade like any other commodity, but nobody would pay attention to it.

I check myself a little in arraigning the monetary arrangements that have failed us so miserably these past two years. The lifespan of no monetary system since 1880 has been more than 30 or 40 years, including that of my beloved classical gold standard, which perished in 1914. The pure paper dollar regime has been a long time dying. It was no good portent when the tellers' bars started coming down from neighborhood bank branches. The uncaged teller was a sign that Americans had began to conceive an elevated opinion of the human capacity to manage financial risk. There were other evil omens. In 1970, Wall Street partnerships began to convert to limited liability corporations—Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette was the first to make the leap, Goldman Sachs, among the last, in 1999. In a partnership, the owners are on the line for everything they have in case of the firm's bankruptcy. No such sword of Damocles hangs over the top executives of a corporation. The bankers and brokers incorporated because they felt they needed more capital, more scale, more technology—and, of course, more leverage.


In no phase of American monetary history was every banker so courageous and farsighted as Isaias W. Hellman, a progenitor of an institution called Farmers & Merchants Bank and of another called Wells Fargo. Operating in southern California in the late 1880s, Hellman arrived at the conclusion that the Los Angeles real-estate market was a bubble. So deciding—the prices of L.A. business lots had climbed to $5,000 from $500 in one short year—he stopped lending. The bubble burst, and his bank prospered. Safety and soundness was Hellman's motto. He and his depositors risked their money side-by-side. The taxpayers didn't subsidize that transaction, not being a party to it.

In this crisis, of course, with latter-day Hellmans all too scarce in the banking population, the taxpayers have born an unconscionable part of the risk. Wells Fargo itself passed the hat for $25 billion. Hellmans are scarce because the federal government has taken away their franchise. There's no business value in financial safety when the government bails out the unsafe. And by bailing out a scandalously large number of unsafe institutions, the government necessarily puts the dollar at risk. In money, too, the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone. Debased banks mean a debased currency (perhaps causation works in the other direction, too).

Many contended for the hubris prize in the years leading up to the sorrows of 2008, but the Fed beat all comers. Under Mr. Bernanke, as under his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, our central bank preached the doctrine of stability. The Fed would iron out the business cycle, promote full employment, pour oil on the waters of any and every major financial crisis and assure stable prices. In particular, under the intellectual leadership of Mr. Bernanke, the Fed would tolerate no sagging of the price level. It would insist on a decent minimum of inflation. It staked out this position in the face of the economic opening of China and India and the spread of digital technology. To the common-sense observation that these hundreds of millions of willing new hands, and gadgets, might bring down prices at Wal-Mart, the Fed turned a deaf ear. It would save us from "deflation" by generating a sweet taste of inflation (not too much, just enough). And it would perform these feats of macroeconomic management by pushing a single interest rate up or down.

It was implausible enough in the telling and has turned out no better in the doing. Nor is there any mystery why. The Fed's M.O. is price control. It fixes the basic money market interest rate, known as the federal funds rate. To arrive at the proper rate, the monetary mandarins conduct their research, prepare their forecast—and take a wild guess, just like the rest of us. Since December 2008, the Fed has imposed a funds rate of 0% to 0.25%. Since March of 2009, it has bought just over $1 trillion of mortgage-backed securities and $300 billion of Treasurys. It has acquired these assets in the customary central-bank manner, i.e., by conjuring into existence the money to pay for them. Yet—a measure of the nation's lingering problems—the broadly defined money supply isn't growing but dwindling.

The Fed's miniature interest rates find favor with debtors, disfavor with savers (that doughty band). All may agree, however, that the bond market has lost such credibility it once had as a monetary-policy voting machine. Whether or not the Fed is cranking too hard on the dollar printing press is, for professional dealers and investors, a moot point. With the cost of borrowing close to zero, they are happy as clams (that is, they can finance their inventories of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities at virtually no cost). The U.S. government securities market has been conscripted into the economic-stimulus program.

Neither are the currency markets the founts of objective monetary information they perhaps used to be. The euro trades freely, but the Chinese yuan is under the thumb of the People's Republic. It tells you nothing about the respective monetary policies of the People's Bank and the Fed to observe that it takes 6.831 yuan to make a dollar. It's the exchange rate that Beijing wants.

On the matter of comparative monetary policies, the most expressive market is the one that the Fed isn't overtly manipulating. Though Treasury yields might as well be frozen, the gold price is soaring (it lost altitude on Friday). Why has it taken flight? Not on account of an inflation problem. Gold is appreciating in terms of all paper currencies—or, alternatively, paper currencies are depreciating in terms of gold—because the world is losing faith in the tenets of modern central banking. Correctly, the dollar's vast non-American constituency understands that it counts for nothing in the councils of the Fed and the Treasury. If 0% interest rates suit the U.S. economy, 0% will be the rate imposed. Then, too, gold is hard to find and costly to produce. You can materialize dollars with the tap of a computer key.

Let me interrupt myself to say that I am not now making a bullish investment case for gold (I happen to be bullish, but it's only an opinion). The trouble with 0% interest rates is that they instigate speculation in almost every asset that moves (and when such an immense market as that in Treasury securities isn't allowed to move, the suppressed volatility finds different outlets). By practicing price, or interest-rate, control, the Bank of Bernanke fosters a kind of alternative financial reality. Let the buyer beware—of just about everything.


A proper gold standard promotes balance in the financial and commercial affairs of participating nations. The pure paper system promotes and perpetuates imbalances. Not since 1976 has this country consumed less than it produced (as measured by the international trade balance): a deficit of 32 years and counting. Why has the shortfall persisted for so long? Because the U.S., uniquely, is allowed to pay its bills in the currency that only it may lawfully print. We send it west, to the central banks of our Asian creditors. And they, obligingly, turn right around and invest the dollars in America's own securities. It's as if the money never left home. Stop to ask yourself, American reader: Is any other nation on earth so blessed as we?

There is, however, a rub. The Asian central banks do not acquire their dollars with nothing. Rather, they buy them with the currency that they themselves print. Some of this money they manage to sweep under the rug, or "sterilize," but a good bit of it enters the local payment stream, where it finances today's rowdy Asian bull markets.

A monetary economist from Mars could only scratch his pointy head at our 21st century monetary arrangements. What is a dollar? he might ask. No response. The Martian can't find out because the earthlings don't know. The value of a dollar is undefined. Its relationship to other currencies is similarly contingent. Some exchange rates float, others sink, still others are lashed to the dollar (whatever it is). Discouraged, the visitor zooms home.

Neither would the ghosts of earthly finance know what to make of things if they returned for a briefing from wherever they were spending eternity. Someone would have to tell Alexander Hamilton that his system of coins is defunct, as is, incidentally, the federal sinking fund he devised to retire the public debt (it went out of business in 1960). He might have to hear it more than once to understand, but Congress no longer "coins" money and regulates the value thereof. Rather, it delegates the work to Mr. Bernanke, who, a noted student of the Great Depression, believes that the cure for borrowing too much money is printing more money.

Walter Bagehot, the Victorian English financial journalist, would be in for a jolt, too. It would hardly please him to hear that the Fed had invoked the authority of his name to characterize its helter-skelter interventions of the past year. In a crisis, Bagehot wrote in his 1873 study "Lombard Street," a central bank should lend without stint to solvent institutions at a punitive rate of interest against sound collateral. At least, Bagehot's shade might console itself, the Fed was faithful to the text on one point. It did lend without stint.

If Bagehot's ghost would be chagrined, that of Bagehot's sparring partner, Thomson Hankey, would be exultant. Hankey, a onetime governor of the Bank of England, denounced Bagehot in life. No central bank should stand ready to bail out the imprudent, he maintained. "I cannot conceive of anything more likely to encourage rash and imprudent speculation..., " wrote Hankey in response to Bagehot. "I am no advocate for any legislative enactments to try and make the trading community more prudent."

Hankey believed in the price system. It might pain him to discover that his professional descendants have embraced command and control. "We should have required [banks to hold] more capital, more liquidity," Mr. Bernanke rued in a Senate hearing on Thursday. "We should have required more risk management controls." Roll over, Isaias Hellman.

So our Martian would be mystified and our honored dead distressed. And we, the living? We are none too pleased ourselves. At least, however, being alive, we can begin to set things right. The thing to do, I say, is to restore the nets to the tennis courts of money and finance. Collateralize the dollar—make it exchangeable into something of genuine value. Get the Fed out of the price-fixing business. Replace Ben Bernanke with a latter-day Thomson Hankey. Find—cultivate—battalions of latter-day Hellmans and set them to running free-market banks. There's one more thing: Return to the statute books Section 19 of the 1792 Coinage Act, but substitute life behind bars for the death penalty. It's the 21st century, you know.


James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, is the author, most recently, of "Mr. Market Miscalculates" (Axios Press).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704342404574575761660481996.html#printMode

Dollar Will be "Utterly Destroyed": Strategist

The dollar will get "utterly destroyed" and become "virtually worthless", said Damon Vickers, chief investment officer of Nine Points Capital Partners.

"We don't have resources. Neither does a lot of Asia to be quite frank," Vickers said on CNBC's Asia Squawk Box. "Countries that have resources -- the Brazils, the Canadas, Australia -- their currencies are doing well."

Vickers noted that their stock markets have done the best year-to-date.




"They have stuff. They've got resources. They export real things. The United States exports 'promises' and 'pretty paper'," he added.

The Big Collapse Could Be Very Near

A US bond collapse and capital controls are baked in the cake. The question is when and how. Hat tip to Duncan here.....


The Federal Reserve appears to be increasingly nervous about the long term bond market. This is serious. How panicked are they? After leaking a story on Friday, they are back at it on Sunday.

The Federal Reserve leaked to CNBC's Steve Liesman on Friday that they weren't targeting long rates. Why such a leak? Probably because the Fed did not want to appear impotent in controlling the long rate. So they put out the word through Liesman that they weren't targetting the long rate. Can you imagine what would happen to the markets if it sensed long rates were beyond the control of the Fed?

The Fed can of course print money to buy up every Treasury bond in existence, but the inflationary ramifications would be Zimbabwe like, and crush the dollar on international currency markets. Are we near the phase where all hell breaks loose? I have never even answered, maybe, to this question before. It's always been, "no." Now it's maybe.

What really has me spooked is another article out this afternoon (on a Sunday) that Drudge has even picked up. It's a Reuters story by Alister Bull. The headline: Federal Reserve puzzled by yield curve steepening.

Translation, the Fed doesn't know what is going on, but they are really scared.

Here's more from Bull:

The Federal Reserve is studying significant moves in the U.S. government bond market last week that could have big implications for the central bank's strategy to combat the country's recession.

But the Fed is not really sure what is driving the sharp rise in long-dated bond yields, and especially a widening gap between short and long term yields.

Do rising U.S. Treasury yields and a steepening yield curve suggest an economic recovery is more certain, meaning less need for safe haven government bonds and a healthy demand for credit? If so, there might be less need for the Fed to expand the money supply by buying more U.S. Treasuries.

Or does the steepening yield curve mean investors are worried about the deterioration in the U.S. fiscal outlook, or the potential for a collapse in the U.S. dollar as the Fed floods the world with newly minted currency as part of its quantitative easing program. This might be an argument to augment to step up asset purchases.

Another possibility is that China, the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury debt, has decided to refocus its portfolio by leaning more heavily on shorter-term maturities...

An obvious culprit for the move in bond yields is the country's record fiscal deficit, which will generate a massive amount of new government issuance.

The U.S. Treasury must sell a record net $2 trillion in new debt in 2009 to fund a $1.8 trillion projected fiscal deficit, resulting from falling tax revenues, an economic stimulus package and sundry bank bailouts.

It's the Chinese, and any other Treasury bond buyer who follows the markets, that have pulled away, to varying degrees from buying Treasury long securities. No one wants to be the last one holding bonds, where the new debt about to be issued is in the trillions.

Bull continues with the part of the message the Fed really wanted to get out: With officials still grappling to divine the factors steepening the yield curve, a speedy decision on whether to ramp up the Treasury debt purchase program or the related plan to snap up mortgage-related debt seems unlikely.

"I'm in wait-and-see mode," said one Fed official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We laid out the asset purchase plan and we're following it. That is going to have some affect on various interest rates, but together with a hundred other things. So I don't think we should be chasing a long-term interest rate," the official said. It's the same message as Friday. The Fed does not want to spook the world into thinking that it can't push long term rates down, so it says it is not trying. But if rates continue to climb, a panic out of Treasury securities is a very likely scenario. And Bernanke has only one play to force long rates back down, buy every long bond in sight, which of course is highly inflationary and puts upward pressure on rates. How's that for a dilemma?

The end of the current financial system, as we know it, may be imminent. If you would have asked me even two weeks ago if collapse was imminent, I would have said it was highly unlikely, now I am saying it is possible. Bernanke may be able to patch things up short-term, if he is lucky, but in the long term the U.S. financial structure is in serious trouble. There is just too much Treasury debt that needs to be raised. An international panic out of Treasury securities, even a slow controlled panic, means the Fed will be the major buyer. This will ultimately mean record inflation.

And keep this in mind, we have never seen a collapse of a currency like the dollar. Even the hyperinflation during Germany's Wiemar Period can not serve as an example. Since the dollar is the reserve currency of most of the world, a panic out of the dollar means more dollars will return to the U.S. shores than any country has ever experienced.

Other countries have had collapsed currencies, but never in the history of world of finance has so much currency been held outside a country of issue that could come flying back, almost on a moments notice. If the panic out of the dollar starts, even if Bernanke stops printing money (unlikely), all the dollars flying back into the U.S. could cause a huge price inflation all on its own.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13826

US is UK in 1910 ~ Currency woes build

Many have asked where this will lead. If you review history and what happened to the Great British Empire when America started coming to the fore, you get a pretty clear picture of where the U.S. is going to go. The pound sterling was the settlement currency on an international basis. It had all the power, all the financial clout; but then here comes America, the up and comer, and they have CAPITAL—which, in the Austrian school of economic thinking, is the means of production. So when the waning of the United Kingdom was going on and the buildup of America began, it was a transition, meaning it was harsh but it was achievable.

That same scenario is taking place right now, except it’s the U.S. dollar that isn’t being trusted instead of the pound sterling, and Asia is the “capitalistic” society because they have a great deal of the means of production. The Asian countries are producing almost everything. And I think you’re going to see them continue to produce over the next decade or so, and you’ll see a continual decline of the U.S. Empire. It doesn’t mean America is going away but it certainly is not going to be the number one productive nation in the world. It’s going to be the Asian countries, primarily China.

However, I’m still bullish on America in some aspects. One is food; the U.S. can certainly get high yields out of the farmland it farms, although nutritional value is another matter and outside this discussion. Second is ingenuity; I think it’s almost built in to the gene pool that the American spirit is pretty much entrepreneurial. They are out looking for good ideas. How to build a better mousetrap, think outside the box, etc. And the third is education; when you look at it objectively, China is sending all their best students to American universities and there’s a reason for that. They still get the best education in math/engineering and science in the USA. America has a poor record during the mid to high school ages, but from the university level on up, America probably still has one of the best educational systems around.

Generally speaking, though, I agree with James Howard Kunstler, who said that the average U.S. citizen has become “an overstuffed, overfed clown.” Most Americans have gotten politically lazy and they’re going to pay for that in the future. They don’t read enough, they’re undereducated, and they refuse to get involved in the political system. They basically don’t have the American spirit that once prevailed. They’ve just become dulled down, but I believe—because of this economic “rearrangement,” if you will—that is going to reverse. So I’m very positive in the longer run that the American populace is not only going to wake up but shape up and move forward. It will be a leaner, meaner, and much more aware American in the next five years. And it’s going to be a tough transition for some and almost impossible for others.

Do gold and silver fit into this picture? Yes! To make the transition as painless as possible, everyone needs some gold and silver. The precious metals can be traded for any currency anywhere on the planet. Regardless of hearing more deflation talk in the news or inflation around the corner, the metals are a crisis hedge, a sure thing in a world of growing uncertainty.

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/morgan/2009/0417.html

Witless spruikers of a flatlined system ~Do Not Resuscitate

Note to economics writers: your beloved free market is dead. Now tell us the real story about the global financial crisis, writes Alex Mitchell

For many years it was my conscientious belief that the worst practitioners in the media were celebrity reporters who did little more than rewrite press handouts supplied by agents for limelight-seeking B-grade actors and pop stars.

I've now revised my views and am convinced that the media's bottom-feeders are the economics writers.

In so-called normal times, these erudite commentators wrote very little and not very often. Indeed, they rarely came to work and weren't seen around newsrooms. They sat at home in their book-lined studies mousing their way through international websites looking for ideas for something to write about.

Having plagiarised a letter from The Economist, an editorial from the Washington Post, an article from the Far East Economic Review or the in-house report from a leading investment bank, they appeared in print, glowing with wisdom.

But when the world economy turned nasty, these charlatans and hucksters were quickly unmasked and regular reporters started asking each other: has that bald-headed egomaniac on three times my salary got any clothes on or not? Answer: No!

Almost one year ago the economics writers started to learn about the US subprime market but immediately rushed to assure us: "This is a purely American phenomenon and won't affect our banks or our economy".

When the subprime crisis deepened and spread to the counting houses of the UK and Europe, they shifted: "Things are worse than was originally disclosed but Australia has the finest regulatory system in the world and our four major banks aren't involved".

As US banks began to collapse and the economy started heading into recession, our gallant scribblers tried a new tack: "Clearly, the world economy is heading for global turmoil but Australia is fireproofed because we are in the midst of a resources boom. So stop fretting".

Then UK banks started to tumble, Iceland went into bankruptcy and the World Bank released dire warnings about the end of world growth and massive unemployment. "No worries", said our economics illuminati, "we have safety, security and stability from five little letters: China!"

Only a few weeks later the Chinese economy hit a wall, cutting production across heavy industry and construction and sacking a reported 20 million workers. The sale of iron ore, coal, copper, zinc and other resources from Australia began to drop and mining companies sacked thousands of workers in WA and Queensland. Our ever-confident economics scribblers were unfazed: "This is a temporary hiccup, exports will pick up when the world economy roars back at the end of this year or in 2010 and it will be bigger than ever!"

What characterises every response they have made to the unfolding economic crisis is their naïve, feeble and hopelessly misguided belief in a concept called Australian exceptionalism. They talk globalisation (enthusiastically) but, when the rest of the world's economy starts to disintegrate, they claim there's always a place in the sun for the lucky country. It's dangerous nonsense because there is no hiding place from this crisis.

The Rudd Government has decided that it will spend its way out of the global meltdown with a $42 billion stimulus package. The Prime Minister has already handed out $10 billion, most of which went into the pockets of the big retailers over Christmas and New Year, but the latest mega-package is the one aimed at securing his re-election with an early poll later this year or in 2010.

In the process, Rudd has reinvented himself, switching from arid economic conservative to Rooseveltian New Dealer. His 7000-word essay in the latest edition of The Monthly magazine sets out the parameters of his political assault on merchant banker Malcolm Turnbull and the Coalition's "aggressive" capitalism. It's a strategy devised by Hollowmen for shallow men.

It's also an attempt to breathe life back into the Labor Party which, over the past 25 years, has become infected with free market conservatism, opportunism (posing as pragmatism), nepotism, cronyism and corruption.

Will the economic stimulus work? I'm not an economics writer but I've noticed over the years that if there is a credit crisis it's quite lethal to create more credit and throw it onto the fire. Every Western government is going into deficit and all of them are following the same prescription. President Barack Obama's Administration has a mind-numbing $1.21 trillion package, Japan $120 billion, Germany $65 billion, South Korea $60 billion, Spain $38 billion, Canada $32 billion and the list goes on.

How are these massive sums of money going to be raised? Who is going to lend to nation states that are in recession and potentially heading for depression?

The idealist fantasy behind this world capitalist bailout strategy is that somehow the cracks in the system can be papered over by printing more money. It's what Robert Mugabe has been trying in Zimbabwe without any noticeable success.

The next stages of the crisis can be easily sketched: Not only will major corporations and banks go broke, but so will countries such as Greece, Hungary, Portugal, Egypt, Mexico, Peru, Pakistan and Malaysia. Protectionism has already started in the US ("Buy American", says President Obama) and the UK ("British jobs for British workers", says Prime Minister Gordon Brown) and that's a prelude to currency wars accompanied by trade wars.

Are the economics writers warning of these implicit dangers? No, they're hopelessly at sea giving risible interviews to the ABC trying to convince listeners that their beloved free market will be resuscitated, if not this year then next.

Meanwhile, world leaders are rushing from Davos to G7, G8 and G20 summits trying to save capitalism, which has passed its use-by date, when they should be trying to save the planet.

link

A$ Dollar may hit 50 US cents

Dollar may hit 50 US cents; imports sink
February 18, 2009

The Australian dollar may sink to as low as 50 US cents even as import demand shrivels, led by a slump in machinery shipments.

Data out today showed merchandise imports sank by 14% in January, or $2.86 billion, from the previous month to $17.261 billion. That compared to a downwardly revised $20.121 billion in December, the Australian Bureau of Statistics
.
Imports of mineral fuels, lubricants and related materials fell to $2.057 billion in January from $2.289 billion a month earlier, while imports of machinery and transport equipment fell to $6.122 billion, from $7.448 billion.

Merchandise imports into Australia for January, in seasonally adjusted terms, were not available on Wednesday, and will be released on February 24, the ABS said.

Global trade has hit a wall as the world economy sinks into recession. China reported its imports fell more than 40% in its most recent monthly report, while other countries are also posting big declines.

The economic slump will particularly hit Australia's currency sending it as low as 50 US cents, as commodity prices fall and the Reserve Bank may lower borrowing costs to a record, TD Securities said.

Australia's dollar this morning fell to 63.34 cents, the weakest since February 3. The currency touched 47.75 cents in April 2001, the lowest since it began trading freely in 1983.

''The global economic collapse, the weakness of commodity prices, the prospect of Australian interest rates going to 2% or less and a severe domestic recession suggest the Australian dollar could weaken sharply,'' wrote Stephen Koukoulas, London-based head of global foreign exchange and fixed-income strategy at TD Securities, in a note to clients.

The Reserve Bank of Australia cut interest rates to a 45-year low of 3.25% on February 3 after the $1 trillion economy grew at the slowest pace in eight years in the last quarter of 2008. Traders are betting benchmark rates will fall to 2.26% over the next 12 months, according to a Credit Suisse Group AG index based on swaps trading.

''Right now, it could be argued that Australian dollar drivers present a bigger list of negatives and the depth of the problems are more severe'' than in 2001, Koukoulas wrote.

The currency may soon drop below October's five-year low of 60.1 US cents and after that a decline to 50 US cents or less is possible, he said.

The Australian dollar fell 35% since reaching a 25-year high of 98.49 US cents on July 16 as prices dropped for commodities that account for 60% of the country's exports. That's the biggest decline among the 16 most-traded currencies against the US dollar.

Australia's economy will expand 0.25% in the year to June, the central bank said February 6.

AAP, Bloomberg News

The rehabilitation of John Maynard Keynes

Continues. The Right and esp. the libertarian Right were always attacking a straw Keynes, some sans "we are all "defict making assholes" now ~ Nixon" phantom.
The real Keynes was much smarter; he made money in the markets and had no respect for bankers, nice one.

As Monbiot noted last year.

"John Maynard Keynes had the answer to the crisis we’re now facing; but it was blocked and then forgotten.


By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 18th November 2008

Poor old Lord Keynes. The world’s press has spent the past week blackening his name. Not intentionally: most of the dunderheads reporting the G20 summit which took place over the weekend really do believe that he proposed and founded the International Monetary Fund. It’s one of those stories that passes unchecked from one journalist to another.

The truth is more interesting. At the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, John Maynard Keynes put forward a much better idea. After it was thrown out, Geoffrey Crowther - then the editor of the Economist magazine - warned that “Lord Keynes was right … the world will bitterly regret the fact that his arguments were rejected.”(1) But the world does not regret it, for almost everyone - the Economist included - has forgotten what he proposed.

One of the reasons for financial crises is the imbalance of trade between nations. Countries accumulate debt partly as a result of sustaining a trade deficit. They can easily become trapped in a vicious spiral: the bigger their debt, the harder it is to generate a trade surplus. International debt wrecks people’s development, trashes the environment and threatens the global system with periodic crises.

As Keynes recognised, there is not much that the debtor nations can do. Only the countries which maintain a trade surplus have real agency, so it is they who must be obliged to change their policies. His solution was an ingenious system for persuading the creditor nations to spend their surplus money back into the economies of the debtor nations.

He proposed a global bank, which he called the International Clearing Union. The bank would issue its own currency - the bancor - which was exchangeable with national currencies at fixed rates of exchange. The bancor would become the unit of account between nations, which means it would be used to measure a country’s trade deficit or trade surplus(2,3,4).

Every country would have an overdraft facility in its bancor account at the International Clearing Union, equivalent to half the average value of its trade over the past five years. To make the system work, the members of the Union would need a powerful incentive to clear their bancor accounts by the end of the year: to end up with neither a trade deficit nor a trade surplus. But what would the incentive be?

Keynes proposed that any country racking up a large trade deficit (equating to more than half of its bancor overdraft allowance) would be charged interest on its account. It would also be obliged to reduce the value of its currency and to prevent the export of capital. But – and this was the key to his system – he insisted that the nations with a trade surplus would be subject to similar pressures. Any country with a bancor credit balance which was more than half the size of its overdraft facility would be charged interest, at 10%*. It would also be obliged to increase the value of its currency and to permit the export of capital. If by the end of the year its credit balance exceeded the total value of its permitted overdraft, the surplus would be confiscated. The nations with a surplus would have a powerful incentive to get rid of it. In doing so, they would automatically clear other nations’ deficits.

When Keynes began to explain his idea, in papers published in 1942 and 1943, it detonated in the minds of all who read it. The British economist Lionel Robbins reported that “it would be difficult to exaggerate the electrifying effect on thought throughout the whole relevant apparatus of government … nothing so imaginative and so ambitious had ever been discussed”(5). Economists all over the world saw that Keynes had cracked it. As the Allies prepared for the Bretton Woods conference, Britain adopted Keynes’s solution as its official negotiating position.

But there was one country - at the time the world’s biggest creditor - in which his proposal was less welcome. The head of the US delegation at Bretton Woods, Harry Dexter White, responded to Lord Keynes’s idea thus: “We have been perfectly adamant on that point. We have taken the position of absolutely no”(6). Instead he proposed an International Stabilisation Fund, which would place the entire burden of maintaining the balance of trade on the deficit nations. It would place no limits on the surplus that successful exporters could accumulate. He also suggested an International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which would provide capital for economic reconstruction after the war. White, backed by the financial clout of the US Treasury, prevailed. The International Stabilisation Fund became the International Monetary Fund. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development remains the principal lending arm of the World Bank.

The consequences, especially for the poorest indebted countries, have been catastrophic. Acting on behalf of the rich world, imposing conditions which no free country would tolerate, the IMF has bled them dry. As Joseph Stiglitz has shown, the Fund compounds existing economic crises and creates crises where none existed before. It has destabilised exchange rates, exacerbated balance of payments problems, forced countries into debt and recession, wrecked public services and destroyed the jobs and incomes of tens of millions of people(7).

The countries the Fund instructs must place the control of inflation ahead of other economic objectives; immediately remove their barriers to trade and the flow of capital; liberalise their banking systems; reduce government spending on everything except debt repayments; and privatise the assets which can be sold to foreign investors. These happen to be the policies which best suit predatory financial speculators(8). They have exacerbated almost every crisis the IMF has attempted to solve.

You might imagine that the United States, which since 1944 has turned from the world’s biggest creditor to the world’s biggest debtor, would have cause to regret the blinkered position it took at Bretton Woods. But Harry Dexter White ensured that the US could never lose. He awarded it special veto powers over any major decision made by the IMF or the World Bank, which means that it will never be subject to the Fund’s unwelcome demands. The IMF insists that the foreign exchange reserves maintained by other nations are held in the form of dollars. This is one of the reasons why the US economy doesn’t collapse, no matter how much debt it accumulates(9,10).

On Saturday the leaders of the G20 nations admitted that “the Bretton Woods Institutions must be comprehensively reformed.”(11) But the only concrete suggestions they made were that the IMF should be given more money and that poorer nations “should have greater voice and representation.” We’ve already seen what this means: a tiny increase in their voting power which does nothing to challenge the rich countries’ control of the Fund, let alone the US veto(12).

Is this the best they can do? No. As the global financial crisis deepens, the rich nations will be forced to recognise that their problems cannot be solved by tinkering with a system that is constitutionally destined to fail. But to understand why the world economy keeps running into trouble, they first need to understand what was lost in 1944. "

www.monbiot.com

*Erratum: Professor Tony Thirlwall, an expert on this subject, writes to tell me that “The proposed interest rate on credit and debit balances was 1% if the balance was more than 25% of quota and a further 1% if the balance went above 50% of quota.”

References:

1. Geoffrey Crowther, quoted by Michael Rowbotham, 2000. Goodbye America! Globalisation, Debt and the Dollar Empire. Jon Carpenter, Charlbury, Oxon.

2. My sources are:
Michael Rowbotham, 2000, ibid;

3. Robert Skidelsky, 2000. John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain 1937-1946. Macmillan, London;

4. Armand van Dormael, 1978. Bretton Woods: Birth of a Monetary System. Macmillan, London.

5. Lord Robbins, quoted by Armand van Dormael, ibid.

6. Harry Dexter White, quoted by Armand van Dormael, ibid.

7. Joseph Stiglitz, 2002. Globalization and its Discontents. Allen Lane, London.

8. ibid.

9. eg Romilly Greenhill and Ann Pettifor, April 2002. The United States as a HIPC (Highly Indebted Prosperous Country) – how the poor are financing the rich. Jubilee Research at the New Economics Foundation, London

and

10. Henry K Liu, April 11 2002. US Dollar hegemony has got to go. Asia Times.

11. The G20 Summit, 15th November 2008. Declaration of the Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy. The White House. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2008/11/20081115-1.html

12. See http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2006/09/05/still-the-rich-worlds-viceroy/

Currency crisis is gathering storm

In the last few weeks, the currency market is where the action has been. We have witnessed massive moves in every major currency and in some not so major ones. To my mind, all of this is a prelude to some sort of currency crisis.

This crisis has been sneaking up on us as most of us have been transfixed by the US subprime crisis and the subsequent credit crisis. For some currencies, it has been a sickening ride. The US Dollar plunged to 1.60 to the Euro only to snap back viciously down to 1.25. The US Dollar plummeted to below 2.10 to the British Pound but is now above 1.60. All of this in the space of a few months.

But, it is in commodity and emerging market currencies where the trouble is brewing. First, we saw a nightmarish plunge of the Australian and Kiwi Dollar as commodities plummeted. This all out assault on commodity and emerging market currencies then widened to include the Icelandic Krona, the South African Rand, the Polish Zloty, the South Korean Won, the Hungarian Forint, and the Mexican Peso amongst others.

This speaks to hot money fleeing emerging markets wholesale as the carry trade started to unwind. And I have slowly started a drumbeat of concern regarding these events. However, today, I caught two interesting perspectives on this debacle that made me blanch. One was the cover story in the Economist.

A few months ago, many emerging economies hoped they could take mass casual leave from the credit crisis. Their banks operated far from where the blood was being shed. The economic slowdown evident in America and Europe was regrettable, but central bankers in many emerging economies, such as India and Brazil, were busy engineering slowdowns of their own to reverse high inflation. They were more interested in the price of oil than the price of interbank borrowing.

This detachment has proved illusory. The nonchalance of the RBI’s staff, for example, is not shared by the central bank’s top brass, who, a day before the strike, cut the bank’s key interest rate from 9% to 8%, having already slashed reserve requirements earlier this month. Their staff’s complaint about pensions looked quaint on the day that Argentina’s government said it would nationalise the country’s private-pension accounts in what looked to some like a raid to help it meet upcoming debt payments. The IMF, which has shed staff this year because of the lack of custom, is now working overtime (see article). The governments of South Korea and Russia have shored up their banking systems. Their foreign-exchange reserves, $240 billion and $542 billion respectively, no longer look excessive. Even China’s economy is slowing more sharply than expected, growing by 9% in the year to the third quarter, its slowest rate in five years.

The emerging markets, which as the table shows enter the crisis from very different positions, are vulnerable to the financial crisis in at least three ways. Their exports of goods and services will suffer as the world economy slows. Their net imports of capital will also falter, forcing countries that live beyond their means to cut spending. And even some countries that live roughly within their means have gross liabilities to the rest of the world that are difficult to roll over. In this third group, the banks are short of dollars even if the country as a whole is not.

-A taxonomy of trouble, Economist


This article makes a compelling argument for expecting emerging markets to be the next leg down in this metastasizing credit crisis. And the Economist devotes much more space to this emerging problem (pun intended).

But, the analysis penned by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard is what really caught my eye. He makes the case for us to worry about a full-scale currency crisis worse than the 1931 currency crisis of the Great Depression. The link: Bank credit. You can think of Sweden in the Baltics, Austria in Central Europe, Spain in Latin America -- and you begin to picture the interconnectedness that will imperil Europe's banking system much more than either Japan's or America's.


The financial crisis spreading like wildfire across the former Soviet bloc threatens to set off a second and more dangerous banking crisis in Western Europe, tipping the whole Continent into a fully-fledged economic slump.

Currency pegs are being tested to destruction on the fringes of Europe’s monetary union in a traumatic upheaval that recalls the collapse of the Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

“This is the biggest currency crisis the world has ever seen,” said Neil Mellor, a strategist at Bank of New York Mellon.

Experts fear the mayhem may soon trigger a chain reaction within the eurozone itself. The risk is a surge in capital flight from Austria – the country, as it happens, that set off the global banking collapse of May 1931 when Credit-Anstalt went down – and from a string of Club Med countries that rely on foreign funding to cover huge current account deficits.

The latest data from the Bank for International Settlements shows that Western European banks hold almost all the exposure to the emerging market bubble, now busting with spectacular effect.

They account for three-quarters of the total $4.7 trillion £2.96 trillion) in cross-border bank loans to Eastern Europe, Latin America and emerging Asia extended during the global credit boom – a sum that vastly exceeds the scale of both the US sub-prime and Alt-A debacles.

Europe has already had its first foretaste of what this may mean. Iceland’s demise has left them nursing likely losses of $74bn (£47bn). The Germans have lost $22bn.

Stephen Jen, currency chief at Morgan Stanley, says the emerging market crash is a vastly underestimated risk. It threatens to become “the second epicentre of the global financial crisis”, this time unfolding in Europe rather than America.

Austria’s bank exposure to emerging markets is equal to 85pc of GDP – with a heavy concentration in Hungary, Ukraine, and Serbia – all now queuing up (with Belarus) for rescue packages from the International Monetary Fund.

Exposure is 50pc of GDP for Switzerland, 25pc for Sweden, 24pc for the UK, and 23pc for Spain. The US figure is just 4pc. America is the staid old lady in this drama.

Amazingly, Spanish banks alone have lent $316bn to Latin America, almost twice the lending by all US banks combined ($172bn) to what was once the US backyard. Hence the growing doubts about the health of Spain’s financial system – already under stress from its own property crash – as Argentina spirals towards another default, and Brazil’s currency, bonds and stocks all go into freefall.

Broadly speaking, the US and Japan sat out the emerging market credit boom. The lending spree has been a European play – often using dollar balance sheets, adding another ugly twist as global “deleveraging” causes the dollar to rocket. Nowhere has this been more extreme than in the ex-Soviet bloc.

The region has borrowed $1.6 trillion in dollars, euros, and Swiss francs. A few dare-devil homeowners in Hungary and Latvia took out mortgages in Japanese yen. They have just suffered a 40pc rise in their debt since July. Nobody warned them what happens when the Japanese carry trade goes into brutal reverse, as it does when the cycle turns.

-Europe on the brink of currency crisis meltdown - Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Telegraph


When the markets open on Monday, I expect the crisis in Emerging markets to take top priority. Iceland was the first victim of this crisis. The dreadful events there should be a warning to policy makers to address this now or else we could see some awful writedowns at European institutions in the very near future -- not to mention the potential economic destruction this turmoil could cause.