The Economic Collapse Blog | November 27 2012
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recklessly printing, borrowing and spending money, our authorities are
absolutely shredding confidence in the U.S. dollar. The rest of the world is watching this nonsense, and at some point they are going to give up on the U.S. dollar and throw their hands up in the air. When that happens, it is going to be absolutely catastrophic for the U.S. economy. Right now, we export a lot of our inflation.
Each year, we buy far more from the rest of the world than they buy from us, and so the rest of the world ends up with giant piles of U.S. dollars. This works out pretty well for them, because the U.S. dollar is the primary reserve currency of the world and is used in international trade far more than any other currency is. Back in 1999, the percentage of foreign exchange reserves in U.S. dollars peaked at 71 percent, and since then it has slid back to62.2 percent. But that is still an overwhelming amount.
We can print, borrow and spend like crazy because the rest of the world is there to soak up our excess dollars because they need them to trade with one another. But what will happen someday if the rest of the world decides to reject the U.S. dollar? At that point we would see a tsunami of U.S. dollars come flooding back to this country. Just take a moment and think of the worst superstorm that you can possibly imagine, and then replace every drop of rain with a dollar bill. The giant currency superstorm that will eventually hit this nation will be far worse than that.
Most Americans don’t realize that there are far more dollars in use in the rest of the world than in the United States itself. The following is from a scholarly article by Linda Goldberg…
The dollar is a major form of cash
currency around the world. The majority of dollar banknotes are
estimated to be held outside the US. More than 70% of hundred-dollar
notes and nearly 60% of twenty- and fifty-dollar notes are held abroad,
while two-thirds of all US banknotes have been in circulation outside
the country since 1990
For decades we have been exporting gigantic quantities of our currency.So what would happen if that process suddenly reversed and massive piles of dollars started coming back into the country?
It is frightening to think about.
Well, I guess the key is to get the rest of the world to continue to have confidence in the U.S. dollar so that will never happen, right?
Unfortunately, there are lots of signs that the rest of the world is accelerating their move away from the U.S. dollar.
For example, it was recently announced that the BRICS countries are developing their own version of the World Bank…
The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China
and South Africa) bloc has begun planning its own development bank and a
new bailout fund which would be created by pooling together an
estimated $240 billion in foreign exchange reserves, according to
diplomatic sources. To get a sense of how significant the proposed fund
would be, the fund would be larger than the combined Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) of about 150 countries, according to Russia and India
Report.
- China and Germany (See Here)
- China and Russia (See Here)
- China and Brazil (See Here)
- China and Australia (See Here)
- China and Japan (See Here)
- India and Japan (See Here)
- Iran and Russia (See Here)
- China and Chile (See Here)
- China and the United Arab Emirates (See Here)
- China, Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa (See Here)
Will this movement soon become a stampede away from the U.S. dollar?
That is a very important question.Continue reading>
