Showing posts with label bretton woods. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bretton woods. Show all posts

29 September 2018

US Debt and the Restraint of a Gold Standard


Although FDR ended the use of gold in domestic circulation as currency in 1933, the US dollar remained on the gold standard until 1971.   The international currency system was formalized by the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944.

When Nixon arbitrarily shut the 'gold window' in 1971 the world entered a reserve currency system of fiat dollars, restrained somewhat by the debt markets and floating exchange rates, often called Bretton Woods II.

The existing monetary system is still under development, even though we assume it is well established and settled because of the Pax Americana.

As these things go, its relatively short reign from 1971 does not guarantee its continuing longevity. The inherent instability introduced by having one nation essentially own the reserve currency, and subordinate to its own domestic policy requirements, has not been sufficiently resolved. Certainly not to the satisfaction to the rest of the world, even if it is a jealously guarded privilege.

Related:   The Continuing Endgame For Bretton Woods II and the Role of Gold
                 An Essay Considering the Current Monetary Order and Gold
                 Europe Finally Has an Excuse to Challenge the Dollar




15 September 2018

The Continuing Endgame For Bretton Woods II and the Role of Gold


“Under this system [Bretton Woods II and the petrodollar], the U.S. is running massive current account deficits to be the source of export-led growth for other countries.  To fund this deficit, central banks, particularly those on the Pacific Rim, are buying up dollars and dollar-denominated assets."

Daniel Drezner


"The inability of global leaders to address global current account imbalances now truly threatens global financial stability. Perhaps this was inevitable – the dollar has not depreciated to a degree commensurate with the financial crisis.

Moreover, as the global economy stabilized the old imbalances made a comeback, sucking stimulus from the US economy and leaving US labor markets crippled.

The latter prompts the US Federal Reserve to initiate a policy stance that will undoubtedly resonate throughout the globe. As a result we could now be standing witness to the final end of Bretton Woods 2. And a bloody end it may be."

Tim Duy

Most mainstream economists will fail to acknowledge the pivotal role that physical gold has been playing in the longer term strategies of 'The New Silk Road' nations in this century.  They dare not, even if they see it and believe it. 

The member of the professional class is deeply conflicted, and must guard their comments if they wish to continue to be rewarded by the established power structure.  It compensates them, and provides them access to information, honors, and influence.

This point of failure in the modern contrivance of self-defining monetary value is the point of weakness in the established power structure that dare not be named.  Or if at all, then only dismissively and with derision.

If money is power, then a fiat reserve currency is the whip hand of empire.  And the less constrained that hand may be, then the greater the power to bend history to the singular will of an elite.

Why is gold such a problem?   Because it is playing an obvious role in the longer term strategies of 'The New Silk Road' countries who are no longer willing to act as client states.

The 'float' in physical gold available for refinement and delivery into the markets of Eurasia became deeply stressed about two or three years ago.

The world's central banks became net buyers of gold for their own reserves around 2006, after more than twenty five years of managed sales in support of the Dollar Reserve currency, the reign of the petrodollar, commonly referred to as Bretton Woods II.  After years of steady purchasing, the existing system of gold reserve management has become increasingly unstable.

It is hard to maintain appearances indefinitely.

Behind the scenes, the maneuvering to stabilize the established fiat monetary system has resulted in raids on currencies, and the 'acquisition' of reserves, including those of several nations, by other than transparent market mechanisms.

The desperation to maintain an 'exorbitant privilege' of a fading empire is a powerful force, and drives spending and diplomatic priorities.

This underlying understanding provides a framework, but hardly the sole or complete rationale, for what is occurring today as the economic order established after WW II, and taken to a different level by Richard Nixon, continues to destabilize.

Will gold continue to be a stumbling block and key piece in the global game of chess?   Nothing is inevitable.

How willing are other nations to place their own working classes on the sacrificial block of inequality?   Will the dollar and its financial system pipelines be allowed to suck the liquidty from the emerging markets?   How practical is the aspiration to a type of regime that requires exponential amounts of force to maintain?

How long can a campaign of force and fraud continue before it becomes unsustainable, so unacceptable to the reluctant victims that they rise up against it?

One might speculate that the US' loss of credibility with key allies, and the willful betrayals of potential partners into adversaries, may continue to impede the progress of world government by a narrow elite, and thereby fortunate for those who value individual freedom.

But a lack of honor among thieves and plutocrats is hardly a foundation for long term stability.

Related:  Turkish Banks Sell Gold Reserves Amid Raids on the Lira

20 November 2015

An Essay Considering the Current Monetary Order and Gold


This message from a person in the financial business,which is included in quotations below, was shared with me by a reader who received it from a journalist for a major media outlet.  Since it was not clear if this was intended as a private communication or public statement, I will not attribute it by name.

I wanted to use the word 'modern' in the title of this, since this pronouncement below smacks of modernism. You know, the belief that all those who have come before us were ignorant primitives, and those who are not of the same received insights now lack sufficient wisdom and piety.  But since those two words combine to describe a particular and unrelated school of thought, modern monetary theory, whose adherents have already excommunicated me for my stubborn and profane disbelief, I think I will skip that and use 'current' instead of 'modern.'

I could not resist sharing this message with you because it is such a nice, compact expression of what the modern financial media thinks about gold and money. Or at least to the extent that they think about anything, and do not just read their thoughts off the teleprompter provided by the moneyed interests that sustain them.  Or what is considered 'acceptable' by the very serious people, those who are described by Larry Summers as 'insiders.'

It starts as many of these things do, with a few simple statements that seem reasonable and ordinary enough, and use a sort of formalistic style to make it seem 'scientific' and contrast our modern thought with the ignorance of prior days.
"Why do you invest in anything? Because you want to extend the duration of your surplus earnings, the sort of stuff that would have been perishable in olden times.

There are two ways to do that:
1. Share your surpluses today and run a credit exposure to the counterparty that is obliged to pay you back in the future an absolute relative rate that compensates you with respect to income lost and potential earnings made.

2. The alternative is to sell transform your surpluses into something more durable, but which maintains market risk exposure."
Ok, fair enough.  If you have an excess of some presumably perishable asset, you want to do something with it to extend its usefulness to you. Or else it ends up like the neglected lettuce left in a damp plastic package in the back of the fridge.

One way to do that is to provide its use to someone else on loan, and receive adequate compensation that may include some allowance for risk.  Or you may wish to sell it outright, and receive something more durable in return, but again with some allowance perhaps for risk.

Hard to argue with that, right?  It is perhaps a bit simplistic, narrowing down all human economic activity with regard to 'surplus wealth' as investing or saving.  One may donate that surplus to some charitable endeavor, or sacrifice it to their gods of the day for example.  Didn't we just do that with TARP, and the uncounted trillions in bank subsidies?

Or perhaps trade it for something not required but desirable nonetheless, like finely crafted jewelry for one's beloved. Investment? The commercial messages for jewelry would like us to think so, but it rarely works that way in romance except for a fleeting moment, and with a greatly diminishing effect over time.

Not all exchanges of 'surplus wealth' are for productive investments or a truly more durable asset.   What then is 'surplus?'  Anything more than food, water, and shelter?

But let's not quibble about what defines 'surplus' and just say all right for now.  But believe we when I say that people's definitions of what is 'surplus' versus necessary wealth can vary widely, especially in these days of elephantine greed.

That definition of 'surplus' is important because it is so subjective, and yet is later used in this modern theory as a high falutin' accounting entity, the equivalence of all monetary valuation.  But it sounds so 'scientific.'  Is what we spend on food and shelter necessary and all else 'surplus?'  How about healthcare?  Cars and electric lighting?  Things that support knowledge like books?  Would there be a common consensus on what the definition of surplus represents, from let's say between Dorothy Day and Donald Trump?

Let us bookmark that thought and move on.
"Gold was an obvious choice because you could keep it under your bed and it wouldn't depreciate in form ."
Ok, that is a bit snarky, since I do not believe there is a long history of people hiding their gold, or any other large amounts of their durable wealth,  cavalierly 'under the bed.'  But it does serve the modern polemicist who seeks to disparage a choice they do not favor as uninformed, primitive, and naive.

Let's just say that for one of the alternative uses for 'surplus' wealth which is 'savings,' some durable, compact assets were found to be very useful. And that they were stored safely in some appropriate manner, since everyone who was born before our time was not necessarily a complete fool or incompetent naif.

We need to distinguish I think between what is asset barter and what is actual money at some point.  I would like to think that describing the difference is achievable.  For example, we might apply some criteria that suggests that a widespread, highly organized society might be more applicable to our thinking than an isolated island people who have no means of mining or access to precious metals and little access to widespread consensus.

As I recall the first formal coins made for widespread use were gold, silver, or an alloy of gold and silver that started showing up around 600 BC in the eastern Mediterranean. You know, that place where trading cultures that sailed from place to place flourished. Although it is known that gold and silver and certain precious and semi-precious stones were recognized as having great value, as shown by artifacts found as early at the 5th millennium BC in the graves of Varna man.

The point here is that it was not just 'gold' that was considered a durable asset.  Silver was valued as well as a few other things from time to time. They all tended to have similar characteristics.  But at some point the precious metals passed from 'grave artifact' to widely accepted 'coinage' and were used for widespread, diverse trade across governing bodies in addition to asset barter.  And I would not discount barter, which may also be called the black market, as a continuing alternative which may be more viable even now than most theorists will allow.

So why not just trade with rocks and put them under one's bed?  Granite and marble are very durable.

Yes the asset must be durable in that it does not spoil or rot or rust away.  It has to be enduring with regard to time.  But there has to be enough of the durable asset to function as more than ornamentation for a few of the finest people.  It must be malleable enough to be systematized into some uniformity of size and purity so that it can be easily weighed and measured and exchanged to facilitate trade without introducing excessive transactional friction.

And so we notice that the author has ignored one key point: manageable scarcity.  What facilitated that transition of precious metals from grave artifact to money?  I would suggest that it was a manageable scarcity combined with social organization and broad consensus that set standards on purity and form.  It was both a natural and social agreement that was widespread and acceptable enough to be effective.  And that manageable scarcity had to be as reliable as the durability of the material.  The scarcity was not expected to be wildly unpredictable and certainly not discretionary by some ruler over time.

So we will not use common rocks because they are not scarce, and not particularly portable.  There has to be a natural scarcity, to make that durable item 'special.'  But there does have to be enough of it so that it can be widely used by more than just a few of the top people.

Moving along.
"Gold is only worth the total surplus of the nation.  When surpluses are running high there's a lot of spare capacity in the system. Gold will be easily swapped into almost anything."
This is of course where we start to smell a reductio ad absurdam and the authority of the modern equivalent of a burning bush.   Let's read on a bit and see where this is going.
If there's a deficit of stuff, neither gold nor money guarantee you access to current output. 
Yes, is there is a deficit of highly desirable 'stuff' any money and not just gold will guarantee you access to it. Unless it is backed by some hairy knuckled fellows holding weapons, in which case they do not even need to bother with the facade of money.   In the strict sense of the word only your own death is guaranteed.  And maybe the recurrence of whacky theories designed to separate the common people of their rights and wealth.

But assuming that a market still exists, which presumes the dynamic of supply, demand, and price,  and a willingness of participation, then the 'prices' or the exchange value of money of whatever form will rise to meet whatever the holders of that highly desirable item may be.  If there is no market, and the item is highly desirable enough, they may be robbed of it, and they have been, but that is besides the point.

I think this may be the point where someone who was writing this has had a recollection of Adam Smith and is distorting the things which he has said to justify some modern theory.  As if Adam Smith was a received source of truth when it suits their purposes, or so they think.

One of the few advantages of not belonging to a 'school of economic thought' is that you are not compelled to carry its baggage, pro or con.  And believe me when I say that in economics there is more baggage, and much of it having nothing to do with economics and everything to do with politics and a pursuit of position and advantage, than on a Kardashian vacation.  While people say 'money is power,' it might be more correct to day that for some types of people power is everything, and money is just a means to it.

There is no shame in misconstruing Adam Smith's thought.  Some of our finest economic minds may have done it from time to time, despite an otherwise admirable record for the most part.  Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman did it in spades not all that long ago by misconstruing things that Adam Smith 'said' about gold.

What Adam Smith was actually addressing in the paraphrased thought was the non-productive hoarding of 'money' while placing greater emphasis on widespread economic transactions, the 'organic real economy' if you will as opposed to the financialized economy.  And he did favor the flexible expansion of money, as typified in fractional banking it seems, as long as it was in response to a legitimate increase in real activity that produced things.

I do think that Smith would have been dismayed though by the actions of the monetarists who believe that one can create the vigor of a wealthy economy by merely expanding the money supply, in QE for example, and doing nothing else in conjunction with it.  I have previously described that as 'cargo cult economics.'   If big plane of real economic activity brings nice things, we can get more nice things by building some things that look like the big plane of real activity out of paper and sticks.

I wonder at what point the money masters will admit that QE is counter-productive rubbish?  Don't hold your breath.  People of privilege will never let go of what gives them advantages willingly.

I like Adam Smith.  I recall visiting his grave once in Edinburgh.  And he was therefore just a man, whose ideas must be considered as his and of his time and experiences.  I do not hold any dictates of dead economists as sacred, and their 'laws' are all too often opinions and observations written in sand.

Paul Krugman Does Some Injustice to the Thoughts of Adam Smith On Money, Gold, and Silver

Adam Smith was no economist.  He was a 'moral philosopher.'  And many of our modern financial shamans have tried to take the moral considerations completely out of economics, in their vain quest to turn it into a pseudo-science of equations and a priori pronouncements from the god of the market that dictates policy as if it were an oracle, or a black box.

But I digress.  Let us move on.
"Money [fiat money] will hold its value better because in an inflationary period it can't be mined."
There it is. The modernist 'money shot.'  And delivered with a straight face.

There is a lot of nonsense wrapped up in this, combined with a leap of faithlessness to the facts.  Let's just take supply, demand, and price and throw them out the window, along with geology and any sense of the current reality.

Firstly, one of the enduring attractions of gold, and to a slightly lesser extent silver, is that they cannot be created by human means.  They exist on and in this world at least in what can be described as a natural scarcity relative to other things.

I cannot speak to the specific numbers, but it is my understanding given the current state of reality that one does not add to the supply of gold via actual mining without effort and delays.  And I think if we keep distorting the markets and driving the mining companies into red ink we will obtain a serious object lesson in this.

Mining takes time and effort, implying 'costs' and 'risks.'  Yes, the supply of gold and silver may be increased, but it takes money, luck and hard work.  And the pricing of the market adjusts to supply and demand with valuation dynamically as it does all commodities.  And gold and silver are commodities as well as 'money.'  More gold is not mined unless it is a profitable venture in a market economy.

But to contrast gold with fiat paper money and say gold is more easily expansible is a real howler.  Has the author looked at the Fed's Balance Sheet lately?  How much time and effort did that take?

Yes gold and silver can be mined.  There is also the recovery of scrap which, like real physical mining, is more difficult and costly to do than just creating fiat money out of thin air, electronic digits.  We have thousands of years of experience with mining and scrap recovery. How much and what type of experience do we really have with purely fiat money tied to no external standard or limiting factor including transparent exposure to public scrutiny?

Unfortunately it is true that the Western gold supply these days is increasingly 'synthetic' in that the financiers are expanding this supply through selling and reselling claims on the same bullion with leverage.  But this is not real gold or silver but paper claims to it.  They are non-transparently mining the stores of gold in central banks and funds and unallocated supplies and multiplying it on paper in a web of non-transparent counter-party risks.
"Money on the other hand can be withdrawn from supply and ratioed up."
Ok, there is the real heart of the matter. This is where the rubber of financial engineering hits the road to power.

Gold can be 'mined' and therefore it is no good, but 'money' can be manipulated quite easily, both up and down.

But now we get into a stickier subject of a 'gold standard,' of gold and silver as formal money.  As you may recall I am making the case for gold and silver as private stores of wealth, against what are some fairly narrow and nonsensical arguments.  The reasons for this will be provided later.

Our experience with a gold standard and its uses are historically knowable.  Which of course the author completely ignores.  Gold and silver are physical units of measure by purity and weight.  They act as a 'brake' on money supply of sorts.

If one wishes to expand their money supply against a gold standard, are they stuck?  Not happening?  No, they alter the valuation of their particular currency against gold, which is the 'universal money' especially with regard to trade amongst diverse currency regimes.  This is what Roosevelt did in 1933.

What makes this particularly unattractive to the modernist is that it requires a transparent and conscious act which the people can see for themselves.

Since 1971 the world has substituted the US dollar as the 'gold of universal reference,' the reserve currency.   This was the replacement of the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, which tied the US dollar to gold directly, with what some have called 'Bretton Woods II.'

The Federal Reserve of the US has quite a bit of latitude with regard to the expansion of that US dollar supply AND the distribution and use of that creation through its member banks.  And that is power, real power.

And people who have that kind of power do not give it up easily.  Theoretically in the hands of philosopher princes a purely fiat monetary system can 'work' like a gold standard.  Greenspan said it could 'emulate it.'  And by that he implies restraint and rigor and transparency tied close not to economic models and the whims of power but to real economic activity. And then he betrayed this principle himself.

In every case of recorded history the financiers have stretched and strained against any and all regulatory restraints, and abused their power to create money.  Even for Adam Smith this was already a recognized phenomenon in 1776 when he published Wealth of Nations.  How could it not be with the memory from 1716 of fellow Scotsman John Law and his Banque Générale and the enormous wreckage it caused in continental Europe still fresh in his mind?
"When the people of any particular country have such confidence in the fortune, probity, and prudence of a particular banker, as to believe that he is always ready to pay upon demand such of his promissory notes as are likely to be at any time presented to him; those notes come to have the same currency as gold and silver money, from the confidence that such money can at any time be had for them...

The commerce and industry of the country, however, it must be acknowledged, though they may be somewhat augmented, cannot be altogether so secure, when they are thus, as it were, suspended upon the Daedalian wings of paper money, as when they travel about upon the solid ground of gold and silver."

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
But I would like to stop here and see if there are any real objections to what I have said in your mind. Think about it. Gold and silver are stores of value of wealth and, with the proper attention to form and purity, have functioned as a store of wealth, and of money at times, both widely and throughout record history in industrialized and organized societies.

Let us trudge on to the end of this.
"Gold is a volatile asset because it is only ever worth what anyone is currently prepared to pay for it. Since it has little consumption utility, the value is mostly maintained by the mass cornering effect of goldbugs who refuse to sell under any circumstances."
Gold and silver are not particularly volatile.  In their synthetic form, which is leveraged and hypothecated representations of bullion, they are volatile and encumbered with counterparty risks.  There are some who think that the current price manipulation in certain markets is intentionally volatile, for all the reasons that the recent rigging in so many other markets has occurred, and for years.

And that last sentence about gold bugs is just fatuous.  Who holds the greatest concentration of the world's gold?  Those ravening lunatics, the central banks.

One of the characteristics of 'money' versus asset barter is that money ought not to have much consumptive value in addition to its durability and nominal stability.  Have you ever tried to eat dollar bills?   People have used paper money to heat their houses.  But it is not very good at it.

What is particularly volatile now are the financial and international monetary markets, because the 'Bretton Woods II' monetary regime based on the US dollar as purely discretionary reference asset for international trade is falling apart, as theories such as Triffin's Dilemma have suggest that any fiat reserve currency would do.
"The use of a national currency, such as the U.S. dollar, as global reserve currency leads to tension between its national and global monetary policy. This is reflected in fundamental imbalances in the balance of payments, specifically the current account, as some goals require an outflow of dollars [Eurodollars, a component of M3] from the United States, while others require an overall inflow."
When considering who the stronger dollar benefits, would you be surprised to learn that it is primarily the dollar based financial sector?

I think the current volatility may continue for some time due to an historical event that so few really remark upon or even understand fully:  the unraveling of Bretton Woods II, and its slow replacement with something else.  But that begs the question of cause and effect.  It is not gold that is changing.  It is as it always is.  And so is silver.  It is the context in which they exist that is changing.

Valuations are wildly swinging in certain markets because of the mass creation of 'synthetic gold' that, with the effects of Gresham's Law, has caused real physical bullion underlying it to flow in increasing amounts to the centers of real wealth creation.   The 'synthetic gold' remains in the vaults of the West, and the real gold is accumulating in the vaults and strong hands of the East.

I am not proposing a return to the gold or silver standards.  As I have said previously, the existing financial system, and the political process it has corrupted, is in dire need first of rigorous reform. Our system is capable of corrupting almost any monetary changes that are introduced, including a gold standard.

Addressing a final assertion, we can stipulate that valuation of most things, and even people, can be purely arbitrary if such a valuation is enforced with sufficient, draconian power.  Some of the most notorious tyrants of the twentieth century have not only believed this, but have embraced and used it to inflict widespread suffering and death on their people.

What I would like is government to keep their noses out of precious metal pricing, so it may reach an equilibrium that is at least mildly sustainable in the face of massive flows of bullion into Asia. And to start reforming the financial system which quite frankly has slid off the rails several times already and looks perfectly capable of doing it again.  Our philosopher kings have feet of clay.  What a surprise.

But since the banking elite are living a lie, that the precious metals are not a currency even though they treat them as such, hold them as such, and interfere with their pricing relative to other currencies as such, it may take some time for that to unfold.

These poorly thought, often contrived, and politically motivated policies that serve special interests are the sort of things that plunge a country into endless wars, a proliferation of unproductive spending for anti-human purposes, increasing repression, and a financial culture of systemic fraud that over time drains the real economy of all of its vitality.

But what is power, if the powerful and privileged do not exercise it.  Even until their own eventual destruction.

27 March 2013

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Currency Wars


I have concluded that it is almost impossible to understand what is happening in the precious metal markets without understanding that the world is in a currency war,  And this includes how the currency war is being conducted, and why.

The US dollar reserve currency arrangement to support world trade was created in the waning days of World War II, with the demise of the gold standard and the ascendancy of the Pax Americana.  It is called the Bretton Woods System.  It evolved quite a bit since then, especially when Nixon closed the gold window in 1971 and declared the US dollar a purely fiat currency.  Since then the world has gotten by on what some have called Bretton Woods II.

After sixty years, it is fairly clear that the dollar trading regime has had a good run, but has now outlasted its effective life span. The nail in the coffin is the economic instability in the US, and the need for the Federal Reserve to go to ZIRP and print buckets of money to support their domestic policy needs.

While this makes sense for the US, it does not make sense for the rest of the world. This is similar to the reason why the Eurozone is failing. The ECB conducts monetary policy to suit the needs of a few core countries, and the periphery suffers. And that monetary policy is covering up the rot at the core I might add.

The situation is similar with the dollar and world trade. The Anglo-American Banking cartel grew up around the US dollar reign, and is still very powerful, being supported by most of the systemically important international banks.

But all things come to an end, and the world is looking for a better solution to the world as it is now, not how it was sixty years ago. But change comes slowly and with difficulty.

I will be very surprised if gold and silver do not play a role in what is to come.

I did remark on this and also on bitcoin intraday. You can read it here.

Great changes are occurring, that cut across political and economic lines.  And these are manifesting as a 'currency war' that is much broader than a mere race to devalue and manipulate national currencies to support industrial trade policies.  Always keep that in mind.

Have a pleasant evening.




05 May 2010

Jim Rickards: Gold, Silver, and a May 11 Meeting to Discuss Global Currency Issues


Gold is showing a potential inverse H&S pattern.



Silver is in a well-defined uptrend.



As are the miners.

But all bets are off for the miners and silver most likely if US equities head south.



Jim Rickards on CNBC discusses the May 11th IMF meeting in Switzerland
to discuss the dollar alternatives, the SDR and gold.

And it is worth watching the reactions of the CNBC anchors to what their guests
have to say, and the elegantly polite way that Rickards deals with Joe Kernen.





It's kind of sad that after all these years Joe Kernen is Becky Quick's assistant.

Doesn't he have seniority or something? Can't Immelt throw him a bone?

06 October 2009

Guest Post: Tavakoli On the Reserve Currency Discussions


Here is a commentary from Janet Tavakoli on the Robert Fisk article in yesterday's Independent.

It is remarkably well grounded and thoughtful in its analysis and is well worth reading.

This is a guest post at Le Café Américain, but links to her site and other important essays are contained herein.

Her insights are a welcome palliative to some of the astonishingly shallow commentary we have seen and heard from the financial media.

Of course we would agree that this discussion has been ongoing for many years, as such a discussion fills the void in the evolution of global finance after the breakdown of the original Bretton Woods Agreement, and the closing of the gold window by Richard Nixon.

The point which we have made, perhaps no nearly so well, is that the actions of the Fed and the Treasury over the last ten years have brought the world to what appears to be a tipping point, something that will finally precipitate a change in what has long been a de facto equilibrium; a sea change if you will.

A major precipitant to the current action appears to be the quinquennial rebalancing of the SDR, which will be occurring in 2010. That, and the widespread financial fraud which Wall Street perpetrated on foreign investors, which has been seriously underplayed by the American media.

This is the scenario which was forecast here in 2005, when it became apparent that Greenspan and his governors, together with the Treasury, were not going to act in a manner that would promote a sustainable environment for the status quo.

And further, that the serial sociopaths on Wall Street would keep pushing their luck to the limit, face-ripping their way around the world with our trading partners and creditors until they hit the wall in the form of a break in confidence and an irreparable loss of trust, triggering a significant financial blowback.

Although there was some hope that Obama and his economic team might be able to turn the tide, that hope is fading quickly. And so here we are today.


China Defaults, Currency Basket Threatens Dollar
TSF – October 6, 2009

By
Janet Tavakoli

Robert Fisk exposed revived discussions by the Gulf States, China, France, Japan, Brazil, and Russia to replace the dollar as the benchmark oil trading currency with a basket of currencies including gold within 10 years.

This proposal is not new and discussions have been ongoing for decades. But other extraordinary moves in the capital markets suggest we should take this threat to the dollar’s position very seriously. For example, China has $2.3 trillion in currency reserves (about 70% in dollars), and China knows how to get its way.

In November 2008, Chinese banks said they would no longer play by our rules. Top tier banks (Bank of China and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China) reneged on derivatives contracts. They failed to come up with billions in collateral on dollar/yen FX trades, which were out of the money after the yen’s October appreciation. This should have been headline news in every financial newspaper, but it wasn’t. Chinese banks defaulted.

They may have been partially motivated by U.S. malfeasance in the capital markets that caused losses in Asia. The U.S. squandered its credibility and our cover-ups have done nothing to restore it.

Most credit support annex agreements would say that closing out these trades would be an event of default, and then the cross default on all the trades would kick in with the same counterparty. But the credit of the Chinese banks was better than many of their counterparties. Everyone was forced to renegotiate contracts with the Chinese banks.

From the perspective of the derivatives markets, this is earth shattering. What would have happened if AIG had done the same thing? (Hey, Goldman, UBS, and others…you want your collateral? Well…Stuff It!)

At the end of August 2009, China signaled that state owned oil consumers: Air China, COSCO, and China Eastern could default on money-losing commodities derivatives contracts.

If we had been paying attention, the U.S. should have done everything in its power to correct our mistakes, clean up the mess in our financial system—instead of sweeping it under the carpet—and turned our efforts to maintaining the credibility of the capital markets and the credibility of the dollar.

Janet Tavakoli is the president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, a Chicago-based firm that provides
consulting to financial institutions and institutional investors. Ms. Tavakoli has more than 20 years of experience in senior investment banking positions, trading, structuring and marketing structured financial products. She is a former adjunct associate professor of derivatives at the University of Chicago'
s Graduate School of Business. Author of:
Credit Derivatives & Synthetic Structures (1998, 2001), Collateralized Debt Obligations & Structured Finance (2003), Structured Finance & Collateralized Debt Obligations (John Wiley & Sons, September 2008).


Tavakoli’s book on the causes of the global financial meltdown and how to fix it is: Dear Mr. Buffett: What an Investor Learns 1,269 Miles from Wall Street (Wiley, 2009).