The Dollar Trap Part II: Mutually Assured Financial Destruction

The current structure of the remnants of the Bretton Woods agreement with the US dollar as the dominant reserve currency is not sustainable unless the rest of the world is willing to accept a form of neo-colonialism.

The developed nations are holding approximately 70% of their reserves in US dollars.

The rest of the world knows it must find an acceptable substitute for the dollar as the reserve currency.

The US does not wish to change the status quo for several reasons.

First, it provides an automatic funding mechanism for incredibly large budget deficits that would collapse without this mechanism.

Additionally, the US economy has become badly distorted, with an outsized financial sector as a percent of GDP created to manage its artificial reserve construct.

Change will be painful for all. Yet change must and will come, even as the US resists that change and uses a type of Mutually Assured Financial Destruction policy to maintain its hegemony.

No one wishes to make the 'first move' to the exit, since it will cause a severe depreciation of their dollar reserves, and possibly provoke clandestine and military action by the world's sole superpower.

And yet, the inching to the exits is underway, and the world holds its breath in case a shift occurs that will precipitously unravel 37 years of financial imbalance in a global economic earthquake.

The dollar will either be saved with a new formal structure, with more fiscal and political overtones to support an otherwise unstable monetary regime, or it will be decimated.

It would be naive to think that the US financial planners do not see this and are not using it to their advantage.

One can always count on a reversion to the mean. We just cannot know when it will happen, or how, or in what period of time.

When it comes it will come quickly like a lightning strike, with a terrific thunderclap heard around the world.

US Debt has grown to be about ten percent of World GDP (excluding the US) which is without historic precedent.



Approximately thirty percent of US debt is being held by non-US entities, in particular foreign central banks.



The Developed Countries are holding approximately 70% of their reserves in US Dollars. The Developing Nations have less exposure on a percentage basis.

Above Charts from "Is the US Too Big to Fail?" by the Reinharts at VoxEU


Total US Dollar Credit Market Debt Now Stands at 350% of GDP. This cannot be sustained. Certainly a certain portion of credit will be written off in defaults. But notice that the strategy of the US is not to make structural reforms but to try and restart the debt creation engine. This will require continued subsidies from foreign sources with waning appetites for US debt that can never be repaid.



Above chart courtesy of Ned Davis Research.

Mark Cuban Responds to the SEC

This looks like it might be an interesting case.

If he is guilty, the conversation between Mark Cuban and the CEO of Momma.com will be absolutely pivotal, especially the source of the record of it. Secondly, the nature of the large sale of stock that Mr. Cuban made will be equally important. Was it previously planned and committed to without question? (and something more than altered notations on scrap paper as in the case of Martha Stewart).

Another issue is whether or not this was polticial payback for Mr. Cuban's participation in criticism of the Bush Administration and his involvement in the movie "Loose Change." Is the 'enemies list' another of the artifacts of the Nixon Administration that turned up in Bush II? There were many.

It will take a 'smoking gun' and a witness such as John Dean to bring that level of government misdeeds to light. That requires a confluence of events that cannot be predicted in advance. But the elements of secrecy, contempt for the laws, hubris, and a willingness to do 'whatever it takes' were all there.

This is a sideshow for now, and we cannot help but believe that Mr. Cuban's attorneys are urging him to shut up, take the fine, and settle. Judging from this he has not yet internalized their advice.

Let's see what happens.

The SEC
Mark Cuban's Blog
Nov 17th 2008 1:20PM

I wish I could say more, but I will have to leave it to this, and let the judicial process do its job.

November 17, 2008
RE: SEC Civil Action in the United States District

for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division

Mark Cuban today responded to a civil complaint filed by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States District for the Northern District of Texas, Dallas Division. In its complaint, the Commission charges that Mr. Cuban engaged in violations of the federal securities laws in connection with transactions in the securities of Mamma.com Inc.

This matter, which has been pending before the Commission for nearly two years, has no merit and is a product of gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion. Mr. Cuban intends to contest the allegations and to demonstrate that the Commission’s claims are infected by the misconduct of the staff of its Enforcement Division.

Mr. Cuban stated, “I am disappointed that the Commission chose to bring this case based upon its Enforcement staff’s win-at-any-cost ambitions. The staff’s process was result-oriented, facts be damned. The government’s claims are false and they will be proven to be so.”

Tall Paul Delivers a Dismal Diagnosis for the US Economy

As much as we admire Paul Volcker, we can't help but notice that he, like so many others, did not have all that much to say while Greenspan and his merry banksters were running around setting fire to the economy while President Zero fiddled.

Also, he is not offering much in the way of innovation or suggestions for the incoming administration, at least so far.

Perhaps they should trigger a nasty inflation and then they can roll Volcker out to fix it. Hmmm, that seems to be in the works.

The 1930's script says that we have a Republican minority and a conservative Supreme court that block the many attempts of an incoming Democratic president to help the general public survive a devastating economic downturn, after a decade of seriously greasing the elites' monetary skids, pushing us to the brink of domestic insurrection, until it takes a world war to pull us out.

Wow, déjà vu!

UK Telegraph
Volcker issues dire warning on slump
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
10:39 PM GMT 17 Nov 2008

Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, has warned that the economic slump has begun to metastasise after a shocking collapse in output over the past two months, threatening to overwhelm the incoming Obama administration as it struggles to restore confidence.

"What this crisis reveals is a broken financial system like no other in my lifetime," he told a conference at Lombard Street Research in London.

"Normal monetary policy is not able to get money flowing. The trouble is that, even with all this [government] protection, the market is not moving again. The only other time we have seen the US economy drop as suddenly as this was when the Carter administration imposed credit controls, which was artificial."

His comments come as the blizzard of dire data in the US continues to crush spirits. The Empire State index of manufacturing dropped to minus 24.6 in October, the lowest ever recorded. Paul Ashworth, US economist at Capital Economics, said business spending was now going into "meltdown", compounding the collapse in consumer spending that is already under way.

Mr Volcker, an adviser to President-Elect Barack Obama and a short-list candidate for Treasury Secretary, warned that it is already too late to avoid a severe downturn even if the credit markets stabilise over coming months. "I don't think anybody thinks we're going to get through this recession in a hurry," he said. (Perhaps Paul needs to send a postcard update to the talking heads at CNBC and Bloomberg - Jesse)

He advised Mr Obama to tread a fine line, embarking on bold action with a "compelling economic logic" rather than scattering fiscal stimulus or resorting to a wholesale bail-out of Detroit. "He can't just throw money at the auto industry."

Mr Volcker is a towering figure in the US, praised for taming the great inflation of the late 1970s with unpopular monetary rigour. He is no friend of Alan Greenspan, who replaced him at the Fed and presided over credit excess that pushed private debt to 300pc of GDP. (Funny how Greenspan has so few friends now, but was so widely lionized by the corporate support structure while he was helping to destroy the economy - Jesse)

"There has been leveraging in the economy beyond imagination, and nobody was saying we need to do something," he said. "There are cycles in human nature and it is up to regulators to moderate these excesses. Alan was not a big regulator." (There were quite a few people warning about a credit bubble but they were largely shouted down, ignored, and dismissed by the cognoscenti, largely fueled by conservative think tanks and corporate funding - Jesse)

Even so, he said the arch-culprit was the bonus system that allowed bankers to draw forward "tremendous rewards" before the disastrous consequences of their actions became clear, as well as the new means of credit alchemy that let them slice and dice mortgage debt into packages that disguised risk. (So let's make sure we try to prolong that system by handing them billions of dollars in taxpayer money without conditions or serious reform - Jesse)