20 Apr 2018

The Road To 2025 Part 3 - USD Dominated Financial System Will Fall Apart

It’s our currency, but it’s your problem.
– U.S. Treasury Secretary John Connelly to European Finance Ministers, 1971
By Michael Krieger: Today’s post will cover a topic that consumed my thoughts for many years, but one I haven’t discussed much lately. Namely, the terminal nature of a global financial system being propped up artificially by central bank shenanigans.
First, it’s crucial to understand that at the very core of our global economy is a financial system dominated by the U.S. dollar. The USD is a fiat currency directly backed by nothing, the supply of which can be arbitrarily altered and manipulated by a group of unelected bureaucrats in charge of the Federal Reserve. This money system represents the most powerful tool of centralized power on planet earth.
The USD is unique in that it grants the U.S. the “exorbitant privilege” of having a national currency which at the same time serves as the global reserve currency. This was solidified toward the end of World War 2 with the Bretton Woods agreement, and was accepted because the U.S. agreed to offer sovereign nations holding dollars a right to exchange these dollars for gold at a fixed price. This fell apart in 1971, but was shortly replaced with an unofficial “petrodollar” system, which allowed the USD to remain the world reserve currency despite no longer being redeemable in gold.
Before moving on, I want to share a few excerpts from an article I read yesterday titled, The De-Dollarization in China:
Petrodollars emerged when Henry Kissinger dealt with King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, after “Black September” in Jordan.
The agreement was simple. Saudi Arabia had to accept only dollars as payments for the oil it sold, but was forced to invest that huge amount of US currency only in the US financial channels while, in return, the United States placed Saudi Arabia and the other OPEC neighbouring countries under its own military protection.
Hence the turning of the dollar into a world currency, considering the importance and extent of the oil market. Not to mention that this large amount of dollars circulating in the world definitely marginalized gold and later convinced the FED that the demand for dollars in the world washuge and unstoppable.
An unlimited amount of liquidity that kept various US industrial sectors alive but, above all, guaranteed huge financial markets such as the derivatives – markets based on the structural surplus of US liquidity.
Pricing key commodities such as oil, which everyone in the world needs, in USD creates a massive structural support for the dollar versus other government fiat currencies. If other nations constantly have to convert to USD before purchasing commodities, there’s a constant underlying global demand to buy USD on a daily basis. No other country has this sort of structural support for its currency, and it allows the U.S. to be far more fiscally irresponsible than other countries without suffering devastating currency devaluations on the global market.
Despite the tremendous advantage such a system offers the U.S. on the world stage, there haven’t been any rival countries that could realistically challenge it given American economic dominance. This is no longer the case.
As also noted in the article highlighted earlier:

Still today, the US GDP accounts for 22% of world’s GDP, while 80% of international payments are made in dollars.
Hence the United States receives goods from abroad always at comparatively very low prices, while the massive demand for dollars from the rest of the world allows to refinance the US public debt at very low costs.
This is the economic and political core of the issue…
Therefore the United States is about to be ousted as world’s currency due to its continuous series of wars and military failures (former President Cossiga always told me: “The United States is always on the warpath and up in arms, but then it is not able to get out of it”) and, like everyone else, it shall pay for its public debt, which is huge and will be ever more its problem, not ours.
This is absolutely key. There’s now a huge mismatch between the use of USD in the global financial system and the U.S. share of the world economy. China and Russia are acutely aware of this and have been taking major steps to transition to a more multi-polar currency world. There can be no multi-polar geopolitical world without a multi-polar currency world, which is why they’re working toward dethroning the USD. I believe they will succeed.
Specifically, I think by 2025 the world will have a completely different global financial system from the one chaotically birthed in the 1970s. The USD will lose its total dominance on the world stage, resulting in major implications geopolitically as well as at home. Though plenty of people see this coming, everybody has their own opinion on what comes next. While it can be fun to engage in speculation, nobody really knows what the world financial system will look like in ten or twenty years. Plenty of bureaucrats have their well-oiled plans, and plenty of bloggers are convinced they know, but I promise you, nobody really knows.
Cryptocurrencies have expanded the possibilities greatly. Thanks to Bitcoin, we now have a decentralized, voluntary, open source, free-market global currency. This is one of the most extraordinary creations in human history, and opens up possibilities for our species that never existed before. Sure, nation-states won’t just roll over and give up their money creation addiction any time soon, but the point is we finally have other options and can choose to opt out while still conducting global transactions. In summary, the next few years will be characterized by currency wars, not just between rival nation-states, but also between paranoid and authoritarian nation-states and new free market currencies.
Readers know what I want to see. I will never get excited about transitioning away from the USD just to be under the thumb of another oppressive nation-state currency from Russia or China.
If we want to evolve, explore the limits of human potential and usher in a world of monetary freedom, it’s important to support the key principles represented by Bitcoin. Don’t say “I like the idea, but it’ll be shut-down.” That’s giving up the battle without a fight. I genuinely think we can create a new paradigm for humankind. We have the tools, we just need the will.



 

Part 1: The Road to 2025 – Prepare for a Multi-Polar World 
Part 2: The Road to 2025 (Part 2) – Russia and China Have Had Enough

 In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

Source


Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)