Mar

22

It's clear to me personally, that whatever the mouthpiece for the Fed will be next week, will try to tepidly unwind a bit of dovishness that triggered the USD collapse this week…

A much longer term consideration is that I'm speculating that USD will remain the world's single reserve currency for quite some time, despite the growing mountain of debt. This will keep US inflation in check, no matter what horrible deficit picture will need to be addressed from time to time. And Europe's inflation will be checked by wage stagnation. As to the emerging markets' real world: they have decades of survival experience with 5-10% inflation, and such would not be an issue to their economies and population.

Stefan Jovanovich writes:

Could we all agree to stop using obsolete terms like "reserve currency"? The term had a specific meaning before 1914 when banks throughout the world held pounds sterling as a reserve against calls for specie redemption by their depositors and counter-parties. It had a shadowy meaning after WW 2 when central banks agreed that the U.S. Dollar would be treated as being as good as gold, but no part of that Bretton Woods notion of the dollar as a reserve currency included the right to demand specie itself from either the Fed or the U.S. Treasury. If people and banks and central banks now choose to own dollars, they do so because they expect to use the dollars to pay someone else or they expect the exchange price of the dollar to rise against another currency or currencies. There is no reason to believe that people's preferences for holding dollars has any direct effect on the prices of goods and services traded in open markets, given the fact that all "major" currencies can be fully hedged and arbitraged. In such a world "inflation" itself has no independent meaning that can be distinguished from changes in exchange rates and price increases that are caused either by reductions in supply or rising demand. Monetarist theory itself becomes a tautology when all legal tenders are central bank IOUs.

Anatoly Veltman writes: 

Thanks Stefan! To re-iterate the technical picture: I anticipate very profound USD strength going into Q2 2016. This will test the commodities anew…And curiously, I also anticipate Yen's renewed strength - albeit after it first digests its sizeable 2016 gains to date. There, I'm at a bit of a loss for fundamental explanation: to envision this peculiar global macro scenario, in which both the risk currency USD and the risk-off currency JPY will suddenly dominate Q2!

Stefan Jovanovich comments:

Almost from the first day Vic was kind enough to let me wander in from the street, I have been panhandling his List's members for answers to my foolish questions. Thanks to AV's recent comments, I think I have found another.

It always puzzled me why people who traded stocks, futures and bonds were so sensitive to what a government spokesman said or was rumored to be about to say. Why should the people who were directly engaged in the most directly competitive of enterprises want to know about stale information from people whose idea of risk was going to a new restaurant on their government-paid expense accounts? Why would Henry Kaufman's guesstimates about M numbers be able to move the markets?

"Markets" are no more "free" than trade is; what distinguishes them from autocratic directives is the fact that their activities are open to anyone willing to make a bid. That is stating the obvious; but what is not so obvious is the fact that people use their bids in open markets to offset the risks from autocratic directives. The markets move in response to government (fill in the blank as to type) statistics as a hedge against (1) what those statistics are likely to make the government do and (2) what future bids are likely to be after the government "does something". A market cannot controlled by the government; if it is, then people stop coming into the room to bid. But all markets, because they settle in legal tender, end up being like taxpayers; they have to account for what the large idiot in the room will do.


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  1. Anatoly Veltman on March 23, 2016 9:30 am

    I must add that this discussion originally took place at the end of the FOMC week March 18. Indeed, no fewer than two Fed governors came out on Monday March 21 to substantially unwind “Janet Yellen”. The USD is now in the midst of relentless climb (fourth straight day, and counting!), and all USD-denominated assets are being tested by its renewed strength

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