Dollar on the Edge
http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=5349
12-Jun-2006
Over the past two months a strange and disturbing thing happened to the
dollar: China and Japan began to shift away from buying US Treasury debt
(dollars) and into the Euro market and other curriencies. Across April and
May, the Euro began to rise, moving from about $1.20 to the area of $1.30.
This has happened despite the fact that the US Treasury has been signaling
more and more aggressively that US interest rates will continue to rise,
making the dollar theoretically more appealing to foreign purchasers. There
is an extraordinary economic danger associated with this: if the dollar
collapses, the US economy is going to suffer a catastrophic blow that could
double gas prices and send inflation soaring beyond anything Americans have
ever known.
The weaker the dollar becomes, the higher US interest rates must go, and the
more pressure Americans will be under, at every level. The Organization for
Economic Cooperation and some elements of the International Monetary Fund
are predicting that the dollar will fall from 35% to 50% to account for the
gigantic debt that the Bush Administration has created by the combination of
tax cuts and spending on the war in Iraq.
This will result in an increase in gasoline prices from the region of $3.00
to the region of $6.00, and will cause all imports to roughly double in
price. This will mean that everything from clothing to cars to many grocery
items will shoot up in price. At this point, the housing market will
collapse, and there will be a wave of bankruptcies. But the new bankruptcy
act, forced through congress by Tom DeLay last year after he received a half
million dollar contribution from the credit card industry, will insure that
debtors can never liquidate their indebtedness, meaning that they can never
re-enter the economy, and therefore that recovery, if it occurs, will take
at least a generation. This legislation had languished for years, because it
is so economically dangerous.
A 'run' on the dollar, caused by panicking foreign holders attempting to
sell into non-existent buying, could cause the dollar to collapse very
suddenly, even over a matter of days.
There is evidence that the US is attempting to manage the decline by
purchasing its own debt. As Asian purchasing of US paper declined last
month, the slack was taken up by Caribbean and UK banks that would not
normally have the liquidity to make such purchases. Therefore, they are
acting for a third party, and the only party that would buy dollars when a
loss in value is inevitable is the US Treasury.
By doing this, the US is hoping to prevent a sudden collapse of the dollar
and the subsequent unwinding of the US and world economies in a fiscal
disaster so profound that it will eclipse the Great Depression. It can work
for a while, but inevitably if the US becomes the only major customer for
its own currency, the dollar will go into freefall. Where it will stop, and
what will happen to the world economy then, are the looming unknowns that
have made world equity markets so uneasy over the past thirty days, and
promise to bring more trouble in the future.
Art credit: freeimages.co.UK
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