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USD share as global reserve currency drops to lowest since 1994

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Re: USD share as global reserve currency drops to lowest since 1994

#21

Post by mvkel »

Whenever I see headlines like this, I ask: what happened in 1994?

It was post-Cold War and central banks were trimming USD reserves to test alternatives.

Then, crises hit (tequila, Asian, Russian, dot com) and the world reconsolidated around USD, thanks to the immense strength of the Federal Reserve and IMF.

Similarly now, reserve share is falling as countries hedge sanctions and geopolitics, yet dollar usage in trade, debt, and crisis funding remains dominant, and unless a true full-stack alternative (liquidity, safety, yield, and crisis response) emerges, history will repeat.

Makes me wonder: is this just an artifact of the world being relatively "stable" right now?

Re: USD share as global reserve currency drops to lowest since 1994

#22

Post by seg_lol »

_blk wrote: post #19
seg_lol wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Ooooh that must've struck a nerve. Seems we can't post that here without massive loss of reputation. Progressivism != liberalism. That stuff just doesn't fare well, even as sarcasm.

Dude is giving what many have wanted for years, the largest of which is a massive reduction in US hegemony. Restarted militarization of Europe, accelerated the expansion of China into Africa. Causing Five Eyes to curtail the flow of intel.

But at the same time, utterly burning US soft power with the shuttering of USAID and most likely causing 14M excess child deaths world wide. Shutting down USAID was a bigger "mistake" than the invasion of Iraq and the blowback will be even larger.

Bro just drove the US empire off a cliff. Manufacturing will have to come back if they succeed in burning US currency. Good thing the rich have so much of it, Elon at 1/10th is still 40-70B.

Re: USD share as global reserve currency drops to lowest since 1994

#23

Post by 827a »

duttish wrote: post #4

I'm not an economist so someone please correct me / expand on this; I'm guessing this is kind of a "It's not a problem until it's a crisis" situation? So far other central banks haven't begun selling treasuries, they've just stopped buying them. But once one starts selling it could become self reinforcing? What could replace it? There doesn't seem to be any new hegemonic power on the same level. Could we enter a worl…

In some ways, this effect can have a positive impact on US citizens; demand for the US dollar requires supply to satisfy the demand. Where does that supply come from? Oftentimes: Printing. The US generally does not make a habit of telling US dollar buyers "no, we don't have any US dollars to sell you", so less demand on the dollar for reserve holdings can have a deflationary impact on its value. This can be combined with lowering interest rates, which creates more domestic demand for dollars, to help balance out the inflationary impacts from that.

Many economists take the stance that being the world's reserve currency is something of a two-edged sword; a curse that does come with geopolitical advantages, but bundles those advantages with significantly more difficult global financial responsibilities.

Re: USD share as global reserve currency drops to lowest since 1994

#24

Post by MagnumOpus »

mvkel wrote: post #21

Whenever I see headlines like this, I ask: what happened in 1994? It was post-Cold War and central banks were trimming USD reserves to test alternatives. Then, crises hit (tequila, Asian, Russian, dot com) and the world reconsolidated around USD, thanks to the immense strength of the Federal Reserve and IMF. Similarly now, reserve share is falling as countries hedge sanctions and geopolitics, yet dollar usage in trad…

No, this is an artifact of Russian reserves getting frozen in 2022 and autocracies the world round getting more careful about having all their eggs in that basket.

The PRC’s SAFE is selling dollars and buying gold in a very covert but absolutely massive fashion, and most likely, so are many other countries in a smaller way.

Re: USD share as global reserve currency drops to lowest since 1994

#25

Post by rzerowan »

darth_avocado wrote: post #17
ur-whale wrote: post #10

Highly unpopular opinion here and I'm going to get downvoted into the ground (who cares), but ... this has been a very long time coming and has very much been a self-inflicted change. My bet is that it will end up being a very good thing for the world at large. China has recently started to buy Arabian oil and paying with yuan. Major countries (India, China) are starting to buy Russian raw materials and paying direct…

Every time I hear people claiming India and China now not using dollar and the end of dollar’s dominance, I feel it’s coming from mostly clickbait headlines, not data. From a global payments share, dollar is still the single largest currency from a percentage standpoint, and is at historically highest share of global trade. Any changes to currency share are coming from lower volume from the Euro. On top of that, if y…

I think youre conflating 2 different things, share as a payment currency and share as reserve.

Share as a payment/trade currency is not going away though it will be greatly reduced especially with CIPS that bypasses SWIFT.Andmost data showing no change is usually from SWIFT - with zero visibility to the volumes in CIPS.

Share as reserve is more visibly viz central banks stacking gold and hedging on treasuries , with most tresurie bids coming in from offshore financial hubs likethe Caymans.So could be a whole shellgame there to inflate the volumes.

So yeah the $ isnt going away anytime soon (cross border trade still requires it in many places),the exorbitant privilege it enjoyed is.

Re: USD share as global reserve currency drops to lowest since 1994

#26

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ur-whale wrote: post #10

Highly unpopular opinion here and I'm going to get downvoted into the ground (who cares), but ... this has been a very long time coming and has very much been a self-inflicted change. My bet is that it will end up being a very good thing for the world at large. China has recently started to buy Arabian oil and paying with yuan. Major countries (India, China) are starting to buy Russian raw materials and paying direct…

> get the bloody USD printing machine under control

The amount the US government spends on debt service is already unreasonable. If the US dollar lost reserve status, the first thing that would happen is that the Fed would have to buy the debt with newly created money to prevent bond rates from causing interest payments to explode. Meanwhile the act of other countries unloading US dollar reserves would cause significant inflation in itself.

Basically, loss of reserve status = hyperinflation. At least at the outset.

On the plus side, that would pretty much wipe out the excessive amount of US consumer debt as long as wages stay consistent with the value of the dollar.

Re: USD share as global reserve currency drops to lowest since 1994

#27

Post by indubioprorubik »

mvkel wrote: post #21

Whenever I see headlines like this, I ask: what happened in 1994? It was post-Cold War and central banks were trimming USD reserves to test alternatives. Then, crises hit (tequila, Asian, Russian, dot com) and the world reconsolidated around USD, thanks to the immense strength of the Federal Reserve and IMF. Similarly now, reserve share is falling as countries hedge sanctions and geopolitics, yet dollar usage in trad…

No, each pushed alternative is just worser. The euro could take over, but europe just revealed itself as a "lawful" player with no plan and no pants (security-wise) - so the euro is just defacto tied to the dollar value wise. For without the us guarding europe, the euro is just loaded with invisible gigantic security and pension debts.

BRICs is dealing in store credits and raw-materials. Every other empire and kingdom is not to be trusted or only to be trusted as long as the town power-drunk world-police-man does his job. He may be the towns drunk, mumbling "Screw you guys, im going home!" but he is also the only one so far doing a decent job as sheriff.

You can grasp how unreliable the other actors are, by how one of the hostile actors (russia) recently complained about the (world-police) doing what its proxies in yemen and ukraine are constantly doing (piracy) to venezuella. They complained about the break-down of maritime safety- to the us. Yep, its that bad.

Re: USD share as global reserve currency drops to lowest since 1994

#30

Post by littlestymaar »

tmn wrote: post #20
duttish wrote: post #4

I'm not an economist so someone please correct me / expand on this; I'm guessing this is kind of a "It's not a problem until it's a crisis" situation? So far other central banks haven't begun selling treasuries, they've just stopped buying them. But once one starts selling it could become self reinforcing? What could replace it? There doesn't seem to be any new hegemonic power on the same level. Could we enter a worl…

There’s nothing fundamentally stopping all currencies from floating against gold and gold being the base asset

Gold is a terrible unit of international money because the supply isn't flexible enough to accommodate any growth in international trade.

Contrary to popular belief, during history gold has always had limited role in the monetary system, because it was too scarce to really be useful (in most of human history, Silver, not gold was the cornerstone of trade, and trade itself was a tiny part of economic activity in an era where most of it was subsistence farming). It's only when banking and paper money replaced silver that gold took a bigger role in the monetary system. The gold standard is in fact an invention of the late 19th century and it didn't last long before it disappeared progressively (the first world war being the beginning of the end).

Unfortunately for us, it just happened to be the period when a bunch of influential economists grew up (particularly Ludwig Von Mises), and like every human being they assumed that the system they grew up with was special and what came after was decadent, an idea that has unfortunately since then become widespread in the general population.

Most people wrongly assume that the key property for a commodity to become the basis of a monetary system is scarcity, but in reality scarcity is a drawback. Money must be abundant enough (too abundant is bad, but too scarce is even worse).

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