(Oct. 15, 2012 - pophistorian) I changed the title because having "oil" in the old title was a little misleading.
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I put this one together based on some recent observations. SOTT editors, if you think it's any good (though it probably needs trimming), message me and I'll send the copy loaded with all the emphases and hyperlinks (lost in this plain text copy).
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December 29, 2010
Higher Oil Prices: Maybe a Deliberate Prelude to Dollar Crash and Depression
Back in March, 2009, SOTT ran a piece entitled China supports Russia on replacing US Dollar as World's Reserve Currency. Well, since then, a lot more has happened on this front. No one should believe that efforts to bump the dollar off its pedestal have vanished or even slowed. And this should make Americans very, very concerned.
It’s important to realize that the US dollar has held this top spot only since the end of World War II, when it supplanted the currency of the last great empire, the United Kingdom. So, the world standard does indeed change. The propaganda that every American is programmed with from birth – that the US is Number One, the best, the brightest, the mightiest, the fount of all goodness, and unassailable in its supremacy – is on thin ice these days, so, understand that its currency is in the same precarious position. The U.S. has gone from being the world’s greatest creditor nation in 1965, to being, by far, the world’s greatest debtor nation. It has proven in the last decade to be a worsening deadbeat, and deadbeats are not tolerated forever.
What the US dollar’s world reserve currency status means
To put it very basically, the world’s reserve currency is used to price every major international commodity on the world market, like oil, precious metals, industrial raw materials, basic foodstuffs, etc. The US benefits from this in several ways.
First, it ensures that every country needs to have a lot of dollars in its foreign exchange reserves, to pay for the dollar-denominated basics on the world market. This sustains a constant demand. We know how supply and demand work. Acquiring dollars is like buying stock in the US. Just like any publicly traded corporation benefits when its stock is purchased, so does the US when dollars are purchased. Other nations have to acquire dollars to buy things, so the game is rigged in the US’s favor. Other nations understand this, and have, until recently, presumed that this demand provided a stability to the dollar that other currencies, including their own, just could not match. For many years, everyone assumed that the US was a good, stable, profitable “company” whose stock would hold its value. But we know that for many years now, US spending has grotesquely outstripped its diminishing income – this is not a good business move – and it now threatens US supremacy in nearly every way. Other nations know this, too.
Second, the US, via the Federal Reserve Bank, has the luxury of being the only country that can simply print dollars to pay for whatever it wants on the world market. The dollar as reserve currency means we pay less for imports, we can easily finance larger debts at low interests, and the real risk of value fluctuation falls on the overseas holder of dollars. With a flagging economy making Americans restless, the temptation to print money is strong. And The Fed is doing it, currently masked under the cryptic term, quantitative easing. If you read SOTT regularly, you know that the US government is printing money at a rapid pace to try to keep its economy moving – to flood the financial system with cash to keep jobs alive, keep banks lending, keep people spending, etc. The trouble is that the US has been deliberately dumbed down and de-industrialized (doesn’t actually produce much of value anymore), so its economy is largely smoke and mirrors – it’s GDP figure, like many government figures, isn’t really honest. Its treasure is being looted to tune of trillions of dollars by the military-industrial-congressional complex and the banks who finance them. Wages are very high and the climate for business is hostile. It’s not looking good.
Look at the last great empire – Britain – it reaped vast wealth from half the world for centuries. Is it rich? No. That money went to the elite who orchestrated the empire. The country was dumbed-down, looted, de-industrialized, ended up with two major irreconcilable political parties, the most overt technological police-state apparatus in the world to keep people in line, and is now handing its sovereignty over, bit by bit to the largely unaccountable European Union and its banks. Sound familiar? Corporations and their banker financiers, in concert, have long supplanted governments as the richest and most powerful entities on the planet. My own theory is that they build up one or a few major empires at a time, making them into cash cows by setting up education and industry to producing wealth via products to sell to the world and/or gigantic military might to subdue weaker nations. They keep it going by keeping the workers happy – providing a reasonably prosperous middle class, steeping them in patriotic, feel-good propaganda – keeping other nations down as mere producers of raw materials (through overt or covert/virtual colonial systems) and truly enriching only that small elite who run the banks and other corporations. They know it can’t go on with one population forever, so they eventually, quietly, start investing in/building up the next nation or nations to be the educated producers and consumers (like China), while slowly, incrementally pulling the rug out from under their present meal tickets. It’s like human rotation farming. After China, India, and Brazil have their day, it may next be Bangladesh, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
Regardless of whether I’m right about this, the debt obligations of the US government, said to be in the neighborhood of $54 trillion, mean almost certain death for America as a top-class nation. Printing money to deal with that debt only devalues the dollar. It may keep Americans from rioting in the streets for now, but it deeply concerns, even angers, every other nation in the world, whose coffers are full of depreciating dollars. What do investors do when a company’s stock goes down quarter after quarter? They lose confidence in the company and they sell!
What it would mean to the US if the dollar lost its world reserve currency status
It would mean quite a variety of things if the dollar lost the top spot among currencies, but it is necessary to understand only one. Prices, of everything, would skyrocket.
Here is one crucial point to grasp. Americans pay $3/gallon for gasoline in the US while the rest of the world (with very few exceptions) pays $6-7/gallon. That high price overseas is not just because of higher local taxes or lower domestic production in other nations. It is because oil is priced in dollars, and the US has traditionally, strategically, kept oil prices low (lower gas taxes and higher subsidies for oil companies) because oil is a chief lubricant of the consumer economy.
If the world decides to price oil alone (never mind all the other commodities) in something other than dollars, then the US will have to pay for its oil in that new currency. In other words, it will have to pay what everybody else pays. That would likely mean $6/gallon for gas. If you haven’t read before about the domino effect that $6/gallon gas would have, let me summarize it briefly: the cost of everything will go up. This is because the vast majority of products go from source to market on a gas-guzzling truck. A big part of what we pay for everything is transportation costs.
Think of food prices. Not only will they rise because of higher transportation costs, but because farming itself will become more expensive. Oil is the lifeblood of farming, from combustion-engine equipment to petroleum-based fertilizers. The ratio of cars to people in the US is the highest in the world. American dependence on automobiles will hit the pocket of most families. The follow-on effects would be devastating to the already fragile American economy. It would mean more struggling businesses, more unemployment, banks would stop lending, tens of millions more families on the precipice would be forced onto government-subsidy programs such as food stamps and unemployment benefits. Mortgage defaults would vastly increase. But the coffers are empty, folks. No bailout will be forthcoming. The states are already facing this problem of bankruptcy and mulling the theft of entitlement funds. All of this would only put more pressure on the government to print more money, abetting inflation even more into a deadly feedback loop. It’s an ugly picture to contemplate.
Could it be that a gradual rise in oil prices throughout 2011 is actually a controlled prelude to the dollar losing world reserve currency status? The PTB almost always introduces its unpopular change incrementally. This could incrementally prepare the US for higher prices, rather than have it happen overnight with a collapse of the dollar.
Too many Americans, I fear, believe the old programming of propaganda. “America is Number One” is a part of their permanent psychic wallpaper. They believe that the nightmare scenario could never happen – that the dollar will always be king. They are blissfully unaware of the years of rhetoric that has been setting the stage for the dollar’s demise.
June 29, 2010 – Reuters: Scrap dollar as sole reserve currency: U.N. report
Don’t be fooled by the clever wording designed to make you think that the U.N. is concerned for the dollar holding of poor “developing countries.” In this case, it means China, one of the world’s next top-tier nations. And the real concern is surely also for the developed nations with gigantic stores of dollars that are withering in value, Japan being number one among them. Regardless, there is recognition here that the dollar’s shrinking value is scaring the rest of the world.
March 24, 2009 – Wall Street Journal: China Takes Aim at Dollar
This particular article cited, as so many do, the enormous “technical and political hurdles” that, it is suggested, would mean a change in reserve currency would be years in the making. I tend to think this is disinformational. This fight has already been going on for years, the idea of a global currency is not new if you’ve heard of the Bancor, and, in fact, a global currency already exists, as we’ll soon see.
June 2, 2009 – Bloomberg News: Dollar Declines as Nations Mull Reserve Currency Alternatives
This article, too, cited an expert who believes it would take forever to put together a new currency, and another saying that there’s no short-term solution, and yet another claiming that he believes the dollar is in its final stages of weakness. But is that really how it’s going. Remember that this article came out a year and a half ago. Let’s now move ahead on the timeline. The international community seems to think that the existing global currency, the IMF SDR (Special Drawing Rights), is looking a lot better.
January 22, 2010 – Business Week: Dollar as Reserve Currency: Mixed Signals
Despite that this article mentions that a former French Finance Minister stated that the US enjoys an "exorbitant privilege" from the dollar's reserve currency status, and states that the US profits nicely in interest from seignorage and other ways, it also cites a study claiming that the US doesn’t really benefit much at all from its currency being the world’s default, and goes so far as to say, “the U.S. is unlikely to prioritize its reserve currency role over its domestic economic agenda, particularly given the economic challenges it faces. In particular, it seems likely the U.S. will continue with its relatively loose monetary and fiscal policies even if this comes at the expense of its implicit responsibilities to global exchange rate stability.” This, of course, is a re-telling of what I stated earlier – that the US has to print money to keep its economy alive, and is balancing this dangerously, possibly at the expense of the dollar losing world reserve currency status. Business Week is simply saying that this is no big deal. Really?
Wealth Daily, an investors’ resource, explains and warns:
Who do you believe?
October 12, 2009 – Darwin’s Finance: Could the US Dollar be Replaced as the World’s Reserve Currency? What it Would Mean
Now, back to the present. I said that the dollar-dumping had already begun. The biggest story of November passed with barely a notice in the mainstream media, though there was play in many financially focused publications.
November 24, 2010 – China Daily: China, Russia Quit Dollar
November 24, 2010 – The Prudent Investor: China, Russia Boot the Dollar in Bilateral Trade
Wow, that’s $50 billion in trade that the US will no longer get a cut of. And what about those secret meetings among other nations about the dollar? Still going on? I guess we’ll have to see.
The uncomfortable fact is that voices continue to spring up, predicting that the end of the dollar as world reserve currency may happen in 2011.
US Dollar Will Lose Reserve Currency Status, (Harvard University historian Niall) Ferguson Says
Top Japanese bank says dollar to lose reserve status soon - "The U.S. economy will deteriorate into 2011 as the effects of excess consumption and the financial bubble linger," Uno told Bloomberg.
Citi: This Is How The Dollar Could Lose Its Reserve Currency Status – “Just about every day we read about some new plan to dethrone the USD as the world's chief reserve currency -- whether it is investing reserves in SDRs, or denominating more trade in currencies other than USD… when the conditions are in place such that a collapse in the dollar won't hurt all these countries, then the USD's special status is toast.”
Jim Rogers: Dollar will be devalued, lose reserve currency status
Porter Stansberry: The U.S. dollar is about to implode
2011 Outlook For US Dollar Appears Gloomy – “Critics of quantitative easing call it a doomed rescue strategy, while new G-20 head Nicolas Sarkozy of France argues against a dollar-based global reserve.”
US$ about to Lose Reserve Currency Status? -- “Major reserve-currency issuing countries excessively print money to get out of their own economic difficulties, posing a policy dilemma for emerging economies,” Jin said in Macau today, without naming any countries. “That will impose greater pressure on capital inflows, bigger bubbles in asset markets and inflationary pressure.”
The U.S. Dollar Will Lose Its Status As The World’s Reserve Currency Sooner Than You Think
Again, the world’s top commodity priced in dollars is oil. Contrary to popular belief, it is not OPEC that sets oil prices, it is Wall Street. As Rediff.com Business column explains, “Today's oil prices are believed to be determined by the four Anglo-American financial companies-turned-oil traders, viz., Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, J P Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. It is only they who have any idea about who is entering into oil futures or derivative contracts. It is also they who are placing bets on oil prices and in the process ensuring that the prices of oil futures go up by the day.”
These companies together are often said to have more money and influence than the US government. They are organs of the PTB.
If oil prices rise, it is they who are doing it. What reason could there be for current predictions such as:
Decmeber 18, 2010 – Total Investor: Lindsey Williams: Crude Oil Price Targeted for $150-200 per Barrel
December 27, 2010 – CNN: Ex-Shell President Sees $5 gas in 2012
Again, gas prices like these will affect the prices of everything thing, and could mean a much deeper collapse of the US economy, something that Americans, I’d bet, can’t really imagine.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I put this one together based on some recent observations. SOTT editors, if you think it's any good (though it probably needs trimming), message me and I'll send the copy loaded with all the emphases and hyperlinks (lost in this plain text copy).
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
December 29, 2010
Higher Oil Prices: Maybe a Deliberate Prelude to Dollar Crash and Depression
Back in March, 2009, SOTT ran a piece entitled China supports Russia on replacing US Dollar as World's Reserve Currency. Well, since then, a lot more has happened on this front. No one should believe that efforts to bump the dollar off its pedestal have vanished or even slowed. And this should make Americans very, very concerned.
It’s important to realize that the US dollar has held this top spot only since the end of World War II, when it supplanted the currency of the last great empire, the United Kingdom. So, the world standard does indeed change. The propaganda that every American is programmed with from birth – that the US is Number One, the best, the brightest, the mightiest, the fount of all goodness, and unassailable in its supremacy – is on thin ice these days, so, understand that its currency is in the same precarious position. The U.S. has gone from being the world’s greatest creditor nation in 1965, to being, by far, the world’s greatest debtor nation. It has proven in the last decade to be a worsening deadbeat, and deadbeats are not tolerated forever.
What the US dollar’s world reserve currency status means
To put it very basically, the world’s reserve currency is used to price every major international commodity on the world market, like oil, precious metals, industrial raw materials, basic foodstuffs, etc. The US benefits from this in several ways.
First, it ensures that every country needs to have a lot of dollars in its foreign exchange reserves, to pay for the dollar-denominated basics on the world market. This sustains a constant demand. We know how supply and demand work. Acquiring dollars is like buying stock in the US. Just like any publicly traded corporation benefits when its stock is purchased, so does the US when dollars are purchased. Other nations have to acquire dollars to buy things, so the game is rigged in the US’s favor. Other nations understand this, and have, until recently, presumed that this demand provided a stability to the dollar that other currencies, including their own, just could not match. For many years, everyone assumed that the US was a good, stable, profitable “company” whose stock would hold its value. But we know that for many years now, US spending has grotesquely outstripped its diminishing income – this is not a good business move – and it now threatens US supremacy in nearly every way. Other nations know this, too.
Second, the US, via the Federal Reserve Bank, has the luxury of being the only country that can simply print dollars to pay for whatever it wants on the world market. The dollar as reserve currency means we pay less for imports, we can easily finance larger debts at low interests, and the real risk of value fluctuation falls on the overseas holder of dollars. With a flagging economy making Americans restless, the temptation to print money is strong. And The Fed is doing it, currently masked under the cryptic term, quantitative easing. If you read SOTT regularly, you know that the US government is printing money at a rapid pace to try to keep its economy moving – to flood the financial system with cash to keep jobs alive, keep banks lending, keep people spending, etc. The trouble is that the US has been deliberately dumbed down and de-industrialized (doesn’t actually produce much of value anymore), so its economy is largely smoke and mirrors – it’s GDP figure, like many government figures, isn’t really honest. Its treasure is being looted to tune of trillions of dollars by the military-industrial-congressional complex and the banks who finance them. Wages are very high and the climate for business is hostile. It’s not looking good.
Look at the last great empire – Britain – it reaped vast wealth from half the world for centuries. Is it rich? No. That money went to the elite who orchestrated the empire. The country was dumbed-down, looted, de-industrialized, ended up with two major irreconcilable political parties, the most overt technological police-state apparatus in the world to keep people in line, and is now handing its sovereignty over, bit by bit to the largely unaccountable European Union and its banks. Sound familiar? Corporations and their banker financiers, in concert, have long supplanted governments as the richest and most powerful entities on the planet. My own theory is that they build up one or a few major empires at a time, making them into cash cows by setting up education and industry to producing wealth via products to sell to the world and/or gigantic military might to subdue weaker nations. They keep it going by keeping the workers happy – providing a reasonably prosperous middle class, steeping them in patriotic, feel-good propaganda – keeping other nations down as mere producers of raw materials (through overt or covert/virtual colonial systems) and truly enriching only that small elite who run the banks and other corporations. They know it can’t go on with one population forever, so they eventually, quietly, start investing in/building up the next nation or nations to be the educated producers and consumers (like China), while slowly, incrementally pulling the rug out from under their present meal tickets. It’s like human rotation farming. After China, India, and Brazil have their day, it may next be Bangladesh, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
Regardless of whether I’m right about this, the debt obligations of the US government, said to be in the neighborhood of $54 trillion, mean almost certain death for America as a top-class nation. Printing money to deal with that debt only devalues the dollar. It may keep Americans from rioting in the streets for now, but it deeply concerns, even angers, every other nation in the world, whose coffers are full of depreciating dollars. What do investors do when a company’s stock goes down quarter after quarter? They lose confidence in the company and they sell!
What it would mean to the US if the dollar lost its world reserve currency status
It would mean quite a variety of things if the dollar lost the top spot among currencies, but it is necessary to understand only one. Prices, of everything, would skyrocket.
Here is one crucial point to grasp. Americans pay $3/gallon for gasoline in the US while the rest of the world (with very few exceptions) pays $6-7/gallon. That high price overseas is not just because of higher local taxes or lower domestic production in other nations. It is because oil is priced in dollars, and the US has traditionally, strategically, kept oil prices low (lower gas taxes and higher subsidies for oil companies) because oil is a chief lubricant of the consumer economy.
If the world decides to price oil alone (never mind all the other commodities) in something other than dollars, then the US will have to pay for its oil in that new currency. In other words, it will have to pay what everybody else pays. That would likely mean $6/gallon for gas. If you haven’t read before about the domino effect that $6/gallon gas would have, let me summarize it briefly: the cost of everything will go up. This is because the vast majority of products go from source to market on a gas-guzzling truck. A big part of what we pay for everything is transportation costs.
Think of food prices. Not only will they rise because of higher transportation costs, but because farming itself will become more expensive. Oil is the lifeblood of farming, from combustion-engine equipment to petroleum-based fertilizers. The ratio of cars to people in the US is the highest in the world. American dependence on automobiles will hit the pocket of most families. The follow-on effects would be devastating to the already fragile American economy. It would mean more struggling businesses, more unemployment, banks would stop lending, tens of millions more families on the precipice would be forced onto government-subsidy programs such as food stamps and unemployment benefits. Mortgage defaults would vastly increase. But the coffers are empty, folks. No bailout will be forthcoming. The states are already facing this problem of bankruptcy and mulling the theft of entitlement funds. All of this would only put more pressure on the government to print more money, abetting inflation even more into a deadly feedback loop. It’s an ugly picture to contemplate.
Could it be that a gradual rise in oil prices throughout 2011 is actually a controlled prelude to the dollar losing world reserve currency status? The PTB almost always introduces its unpopular change incrementally. This could incrementally prepare the US for higher prices, rather than have it happen overnight with a collapse of the dollar.
Too many Americans, I fear, believe the old programming of propaganda. “America is Number One” is a part of their permanent psychic wallpaper. They believe that the nightmare scenario could never happen – that the dollar will always be king. They are blissfully unaware of the years of rhetoric that has been setting the stage for the dollar’s demise.
June 29, 2010 – Reuters: Scrap dollar as sole reserve currency: U.N. report
Don’t be fooled by the clever wording designed to make you think that the U.N. is concerned for the dollar holding of poor “developing countries.” In this case, it means China, one of the world’s next top-tier nations. And the real concern is surely also for the developed nations with gigantic stores of dollars that are withering in value, Japan being number one among them. Regardless, there is recognition here that the dollar’s shrinking value is scaring the rest of the world.
March 24, 2009 – Wall Street Journal: China Takes Aim at Dollar
This particular article cited, as so many do, the enormous “technical and political hurdles” that, it is suggested, would mean a change in reserve currency would be years in the making. I tend to think this is disinformational. This fight has already been going on for years, the idea of a global currency is not new if you’ve heard of the Bancor, and, in fact, a global currency already exists, as we’ll soon see.
June 2, 2009 – Bloomberg News: Dollar Declines as Nations Mull Reserve Currency Alternatives
This article, too, cited an expert who believes it would take forever to put together a new currency, and another saying that there’s no short-term solution, and yet another claiming that he believes the dollar is in its final stages of weakness. But is that really how it’s going. Remember that this article came out a year and a half ago. Let’s now move ahead on the timeline. The international community seems to think that the existing global currency, the IMF SDR (Special Drawing Rights), is looking a lot better.
January 22, 2010 – Business Week: Dollar as Reserve Currency: Mixed Signals
Despite that this article mentions that a former French Finance Minister stated that the US enjoys an "exorbitant privilege" from the dollar's reserve currency status, and states that the US profits nicely in interest from seignorage and other ways, it also cites a study claiming that the US doesn’t really benefit much at all from its currency being the world’s default, and goes so far as to say, “the U.S. is unlikely to prioritize its reserve currency role over its domestic economic agenda, particularly given the economic challenges it faces. In particular, it seems likely the U.S. will continue with its relatively loose monetary and fiscal policies even if this comes at the expense of its implicit responsibilities to global exchange rate stability.” This, of course, is a re-telling of what I stated earlier – that the US has to print money to keep its economy alive, and is balancing this dangerously, possibly at the expense of the dollar losing world reserve currency status. Business Week is simply saying that this is no big deal. Really?
Wealth Daily, an investors’ resource, explains and warns:
Who do you believe?
October 12, 2009 – Darwin’s Finance: Could the US Dollar be Replaced as the World’s Reserve Currency? What it Would Mean
Now, back to the present. I said that the dollar-dumping had already begun. The biggest story of November passed with barely a notice in the mainstream media, though there was play in many financially focused publications.
November 24, 2010 – China Daily: China, Russia Quit Dollar
November 24, 2010 – The Prudent Investor: China, Russia Boot the Dollar in Bilateral Trade
Wow, that’s $50 billion in trade that the US will no longer get a cut of. And what about those secret meetings among other nations about the dollar? Still going on? I guess we’ll have to see.
The uncomfortable fact is that voices continue to spring up, predicting that the end of the dollar as world reserve currency may happen in 2011.
US Dollar Will Lose Reserve Currency Status, (Harvard University historian Niall) Ferguson Says
Top Japanese bank says dollar to lose reserve status soon - "The U.S. economy will deteriorate into 2011 as the effects of excess consumption and the financial bubble linger," Uno told Bloomberg.
Citi: This Is How The Dollar Could Lose Its Reserve Currency Status – “Just about every day we read about some new plan to dethrone the USD as the world's chief reserve currency -- whether it is investing reserves in SDRs, or denominating more trade in currencies other than USD… when the conditions are in place such that a collapse in the dollar won't hurt all these countries, then the USD's special status is toast.”
Jim Rogers: Dollar will be devalued, lose reserve currency status
Porter Stansberry: The U.S. dollar is about to implode
2011 Outlook For US Dollar Appears Gloomy – “Critics of quantitative easing call it a doomed rescue strategy, while new G-20 head Nicolas Sarkozy of France argues against a dollar-based global reserve.”
US$ about to Lose Reserve Currency Status? -- “Major reserve-currency issuing countries excessively print money to get out of their own economic difficulties, posing a policy dilemma for emerging economies,” Jin said in Macau today, without naming any countries. “That will impose greater pressure on capital inflows, bigger bubbles in asset markets and inflationary pressure.”
The U.S. Dollar Will Lose Its Status As The World’s Reserve Currency Sooner Than You Think
Again, the world’s top commodity priced in dollars is oil. Contrary to popular belief, it is not OPEC that sets oil prices, it is Wall Street. As Rediff.com Business column explains, “Today's oil prices are believed to be determined by the four Anglo-American financial companies-turned-oil traders, viz., Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, J P Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. It is only they who have any idea about who is entering into oil futures or derivative contracts. It is also they who are placing bets on oil prices and in the process ensuring that the prices of oil futures go up by the day.”
These companies together are often said to have more money and influence than the US government. They are organs of the PTB.
If oil prices rise, it is they who are doing it. What reason could there be for current predictions such as:
Decmeber 18, 2010 – Total Investor: Lindsey Williams: Crude Oil Price Targeted for $150-200 per Barrel
December 27, 2010 – CNN: Ex-Shell President Sees $5 gas in 2012
Again, gas prices like these will affect the prices of everything thing, and could mean a much deeper collapse of the US economy, something that Americans, I’d bet, can’t really imagine.
Thanks for sharing it.
