Currency Wars_ The Making of the Next Global Crisis - James Rickards [1]
Today we are engaged in a new currency war, and another crisis of confidence in the dollar is on its way. This time the consequences will be far worse than those confronting Nixon. The growth in globalization, derivatives and leverage over the past forty years have made financial panic and contagion all but impossible to contain.
The new crisis will likely begin in the currency markets and spread quickly to stocks, bonds and commodities. When the dollar collapses, the dollar-denominated markets will collapse too. Panic will quickly spread throughout the world.
As a result, another U.S. president, possibly President Obama, will take to the airwaves and cyberspace to announce a radical plan of intervention to save the dollar from complete collapse, invoking legal authority already in place today. This new plan may even involve a return to the gold standard. If gold is used, it will be at a dramatically higher price in order to support the bloated money supply with the fixed quantity of gold available. Americans who had invested in gold earlier will be confronted with a 90 percent “windfall profits” tax on their newfound wealth, imposed in the name of fairness. European and Japanese gold presently stored in New York will be confiscated and converted to use in the service of the New Dollar Policy. No doubt the Europeans and Japanese will be given receipts for their former gold, convertible into New Dollars at a new, higher price.
Alternatively, the president may eschew a return to gold and use an array of capital controls and global IMF money creation to reliquify and stabilize the situation. This IMF global bailout will not be in old, nonconvertible dollars but in a newly printed global currency called the SDR. Life will go on but the international monetary system will never be the same.
This isn’t far-fetched speculation. It has all happened before. Time and again, paper currencies have collapsed, assets have been frozen, gold has been confiscated and capital controls have been imposed. The United States has not been immune to these acts; in fact, America has been a leading advocate of dollar debasement from the 1770s to the 1970s, through the Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression and Carter-era hyperinflation. The fact that a currency collapse has not happened in a generation just implies that the next crash is overdue. This is not a matter of guesswork—the preconditions are already in place.
Today, the U.S. Federal Reserve, under the guidance of Chairman Ben Bernanke, is engaged in the greatest gamble in the history of finance. Beginning in 2007, the Fed fought off economic collapse by cutting short-term interest rates and lending freely. Eventually rates reached zero, and the Fed appeared to be out of bullets.
Then, in 2008, the Fed found a new bullet: quantitative easing. While the Fed describes the program as an easing of financial conditions through the lowering of long-term interest rates, this is essentially a program of printing money to spur growth.
The Fed is attempting to inflate asset prices, commodity prices and consumer prices to offset the natural deflation that follows a crash. It is basically engaged in a game of tug-of-war against the deflation that normally accompanies a depression. As in a typical tug-of-war, not much happens at first. The teams are evenly matched and there is no motion for a while, just lots of tension on the rope. Eventually one side will collapse, and the other side will drag the losers over the line to claim victory. This is the essence of the Fed’s gamble. It must cause inflation before deflation prevails; it must win the tug-of-war.
In a tug-of-war, the rope is the channel through which stress is conveyed from one side to the other. This book is about that rope. In the contest between inflation and deflation, the rope is the dollar. The dollar bears all the stress of the opposing forces and sends that stress around