China offers next step in removing dollar from reserve currency status

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August 5, 2013

On Aug. 5, an official from the People's Bank of China (PBoC), published an article in a leading Chinese market journal suggesting that now would be a good time to convene a new 'Bretton Woods' conference with the intention of creating and implementing a new gold backed reserve currency to replace the dying dollar.

Yao Yudong of the PBoC's monetary policy committee has called for a new Bretton Woods system to strengthen the management of global liquidity. In an article in the China Securities Journal, Yao called for more power to the IMF as international cooperation and supervision are needed. - Zerohedge

Last September, China made an initial move against the dollar when it created a new oil wholesaling structure which would allow countries to buy and sell the commodity in currencies other than the petrodollar. This policy was the first in over 40 years that challenged dollar hegemony, and in that time, it has opened the door for many more trade agreements across Asia that bypass the dollar and current reserve currency.
Other regions outside Asia are also recognizing the rise of the Chinese currency in international transactions at the same time many nations seek to divest themselves of dollar reserves. In March of this year, the Bank of England became the first primary central bank to allow currency swaps of the Chinese Yuan, ahead of states such as France and Switzerland who are in negotiations to do the same. All this, at a time when Yuan denominated bonds have increased 171 times worldwide since the credit crisis of 2008, and global trade in the Yuan has gone from 0% to 12% in just five years.
The average life-cycle of a strictly fiat currency throughout history is just 30 years, with a ceiling period of around 42 years. As of 2013, the dollar has reached that threshold since it was adopted in its current form in 1971, and in those 42 years of global dominance, destructive monetary polices by the central bank are quickly bringing its worldwide acceptance to an end. And with the Federal Reserve's ongoing QE programs that promote money printing over resolving the enormous debt issues still hampering the U.S. economy, China appears ready to implement its next move in dethroning king dollar, by calling for a new Bretton Woods conference that would favor their currency to be the next world reserve.

2014 will be the year of the currency reset and gold backed trade note

December 28, 2013

On Dec. 26, financial analyst and statistician Dr. Jim Willie provided a look at major economic events that will take place and shape the global financial system in 2014. Of the several key changes set to occur in how nations trade amongst one another, the two primary events. that of a currency reset and the implementation of a gold backed trade note, will be the catalyst for China's vision of a de-Americanized financial order.

The next year will feature many powerful new effects. The Indirect Exchange will become a prominent fixture, its channel filled. It will direct many $billions in USTreasury Bonds from large scale asset acquisitions by Eastern and BRICS players, sent back to New York and London. The payments for the asset purchases will be done in USTBonds, as the Eastern entities dump them as fast as they can before the great devaluation.
But the biggest shock waves will come from the currency reset followed by the introduction of the Gold Trade Settlement. The return of the Gold Standard is near, but it will arrive on the trade vehicles, not the FOREX currency or SWIFT bank platforms. It will feature the Gold Trade Note, used as letter of credit. - Goldseek

At least 23 nations have already prepared for a new trade system that will occur outside the dollar and Swift systems. Through their moves away from reliance on the dollar via the creation of new currency swap lines, major economic powers are transitioning away from the 42 year old petro-dollar system that saw America devalue its currency nearly 98%, and export inflation to the rest of the world.
A global currency reset is inevitable, especially when you consider that the historic life cycle of a purely fiat currency is only 30 years, with a maximum length of 42 years. This falls in line with the U.S. dollar which has been a purely fiat currency since President Nixon took America off the gold standard in 1971, and subsequently allowed the central bank to grow the economy with debt rather than sound money and real production.
2013 will go down in history as the year of global currency wars. But intermixed in this financial conflict will be the rise of China, and their plans for a new financial order. And as Dr. Willie points out in his assessment for the coming year, when the global currency reset happens, the vacuum that will occur will not be void for long, and will be quickly filled by China with two new options that promise greater stability than what the U.S. had offered for more than a decade.

Fasten Your Seatbelts: The Coming Global Monetary Reset

February 26, 2014 By 21wire 14 Comments

Andrew McKillop
21st Century Wire

The big currency reset. It’s not a case of ‘if’ – it’s a case of when.
Don’t expect your provincial Secretary of Treasury or Chancellor Exchequer to warn you about what is coming around the corner, because they are either too stupid to know, or too busy covering their own backsides.

To understand where we are, it’s very important to understand how we got here (another point which bureaucrats and backers do not want the general populace to know).

A quick history lesson then…
The Opposite of Emerging is Submerging
Lulled and distracted by the antics of developed country central banks and emerging economy central banks – to constantly “pump-up the jam” and flood the economy with paper casino chips from either Fort Knox or Mount Gox, the real tectonic shift of the global economy since 2008 has been more or less ignored by financial gurus and sages. It is taken as “normal” that deflation, or disinflation is operating in the developed economies, but now we can see that rip-roaring inflation operating in the emerging economies.

Supposedly, this is ‘Muddle Through’, but since 2008 the North-South paradigm has all but dissolved – the developed OECD economies are locked in a death embrace with the Emerging economies. The developed economies are now locked into chronic globalization – exporting monetary inflation while importing cheap industrial goods, services and resources.
Since 2008 the always-promised ‘world shift’ of the economy from west to east, and from north to south has happened, but the net result is a shock. Pretending “we didn’t know” is comforting, but ultimately stupid.
This is an unstable equilibrium, or an interregnum – even a sideshow, because the current global economic context and process is the exact opposite of sustainable. Harm to both North and South is now the main impact of the post-2008 process of overreach and intense fiat paper shuffling. Listing the consequences and causes of this overreach is not easy and always open to argument, but possibly the best summary is to suggest that since 2008, ‘Ricardo’s comparative advantage‘ paradigm has been inverted. Economic and above all monetary globalization is now the path to ruin and poverty. From win-win to lose-lose. The worse it gets, expect the architects of ruin – establishment politicians, central bankers and financial pundits, to retreat into even deeper denial.

The Production Bubble That Triggers the Collapse
Another simple way to argue the global economy has overreached is that industrial and economic production capacity in the Emerging economies (EMs), starting with the BRICs, is now massively over-sized. This means the EMs can and will saturate the post-industrial, deflating North with industrial supply at every stage and opportunity as technology, design and product development throw up a new market openings everywhere. Examples like the car and cellphone, fashion wear and off-shore call center industries are relatively “classic”. All of these are already saturated with capacity – but the EMs are still adding more. Previous historical “classic examples” of this process for example included the ship building industry, but the scale paradigm has been woefully ignored.


BRAZILIAN SKILLZ: Production of top-line automobiles in Brazil has surpassed many of its ‘developed’ counterparts.
Since 2008, the process has intensified, creating an increasingly certain outlook for a forced and fiat end to the willingness of the EMs to accept the fiat currency endlessly printed to finance the deflating, de-industrializing DMs (developed economies).

This will not necessarily be a politicized process, of the type hinted at by India’s central bank governor (see http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/tag/raghuram-rajan/), due to the rapidity and scale of the crisis, but instead trigger the collapse of the current global fiat monetary order dictated by national economic self-defence and survival in the EMs.

The economic jump start of the Ricardo model, which has run riot for the last quarter-century, and went into over-drived from 2008 – will be abandoned.
Deflation/Inflation: Two Sides of the Same Bitcoin
Ricardo’s original model held sunny Portugual as a producer of cork and sherry, while rainy England could produce wine casks from its oak forests and wool from its sheep flocks. The money used in a basically resource-based exchange using then-rapidly growing maritime transport capabilities was held to be stable and gold-linked (or based). Later on, low-cost labor resources were built into Ricardo’s paradigm called “comparative advantage”. The EMs since the 1980s have played the role of resource providers while the DMs were the solvent market suppliers.
While there was a clear limit on cork, wine, oak casks and woolens supply and demand, this does not really apply to modern global fiat money and modern industrial technology. These are high gain positive feedback processes which only stop when they hit a brick wall.
The Ricardo comparative advantage model does not apply to post-1980′s globalization and super economies – like those of China and India, where industrial technology has raced ahead of infrastructure development. This is simply a bomb waiting to explode, alongside the industrial capacity growth, the EMs engaged massive growth of credit, mushroom growth urbanization, neglect of the agriculture and food sector, and turning a blind eye to rampant or even “structural” corruption. Inflation was the sure and certain result.


The results do not stop there. While inflation took off inside the EMs, with their economies producing more than they can consume, and exporting to the DMs which consume more than they produce, the EMs are also exported deflation to the developed market economies. At the same time, the emerging market economies mined out their capital bases to maintain their breakneck growth of industrial capacity.

On an almost daily basis now, the EMs are all shifting to current account deficit with the inevitable consequences of national currency devaluation, further inflation, and of course – higher interest rates.
Win-Win to Lose-Lose: Global Fiat Currency Crisis
The post-1980′s economic globalization paradigm can be called an initial ‘Win-Win’ model which eventually morphed to Lose-Lose.

The industrial nations of the DMs, which formerly benefited from the resource nations of the EMs under the previous ‘Ricardo-type’ model, are now mired in debt and de-industrialization, making it impossible for them to “grow their way out of crisis”. The EMs on their present industrial expansion path can only grow themselves into rapidly-deepening crisis.
The “money-in-the-middle” especially concerns the US dollar and its subsidiary partner, the euro, both of which are vastly overvalued fiat currencies – but against what? Almost inevitably, this will feature a big rebound for gold, playing the starring role of in this latest episode of “Canary in the Monetary Coal Mine”. From a personal standpoint, or national (for those who have any), physical gold and silver could end up providing solid protection against the exposure of a monetary reset.

Conversely, commodities are unlikely to profit on an enduring sustained basis, due to economic restructuring, re-centering and contraction being almost certain.

Commenting on the IMF’s latest report on global capital flows since 1980, Reuters on 30 January said that while the IMF estimates net capital inflows to emerging economies as $7 trillion or more only since 2005, this was a “legacy trend” hinged on the EMs running a much higher GDP growth differential above the DMs than present. The IMF report noted that for 2014, economic growth in the BRICs will go on declining, and for Russia and Brazil, they will be less even than the GDP growth of the US and Britain. While the IMF’s economists do not allow themselves to project break-of-series change to the global economy, the process of what Gordon T. Long calls “Global collateral impairment” can easily default as the net result of apparently ‘unrelated and complex’ runaway processes.
This collateral impairment will inevitably trigger multi-national currency protection measures, a situation already clear in countries like Turkey, India, Argentina and other EMs.

For DMs in the North, plans are likely already underway. Will the reset feature a brand new reserve currency, or the introduction a fledgling single global, or virtual currency? If so, what will it be backed by (or maybe it won’t). It’s hard to know right now, but a shift of that magnitude could provide for the introduction of something new in the mix.

It’s a case of problem, reaction, solution, and one can assume that this Hegelian equation has already been mapped out on the back of a napkin in an executive dining floor of the one of the world leading central banks, possibly written using Christine Lagarde’s lip stick.

As a result, sacrificing GDP growth to protect the national money in the EMs will be inevitable. In turn, this will send a severe shock wave North to the DMs ,which have surfed on the latter-day version of the Ricardo paradigm for the last 30 years, and are now left unable to adapt.

The basic conclusion is that a global monetary reset is now overdue.

There will be shock waves, and haircuts too.

Brace yourself for impact, because it’s coming.