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The ultimate demise of dollar reserve status
November 3, 2009
By Joseph Edozien
On continued thought, it seems increasingly difficult to avoid the murky conclusion that the ultimate demise of dollar reserve status is the implicit monetary policy of the United States of America.
Both the rhetorical and policy responses from the monetary authorities in the United States to the not so veiled undermining of confidence in the global currency reserve status of the dollar from other monetary authorities, notably from China and Russia, have been remarkably tepid and timid. This diffidence is not normal from America and is therefore thought-provoking.
This of course raises the quite awkward question of why and how patriotic monetary authorities in the United States could possibly see merit in implicitly colluding in the debasement of the perceived value of its own sovereign currency.
Does such implicit collusion make any sense? It does.
New Currency Possible
The eroding fundamentals of the dollar may necessitate its ultimate demise in any case.
One expects that such a death process will be orderly and gradual if there is indeed such a process in the further evolution of global financial events.
But there is a non-ignorable risk that such a death process, if there is such, could spiral out of control of the monetary authorities and become disorderly and sudden after an accelerated period of decline which erodes confidence rapidly, leading to a herd-like stampede from the dollar, thereby entailing catastrophic consequences in the real economic world of you and me.
Ever since the end of World War II, the dollar has been the de facto coin of the globe in international transactions. It has been the world’s de facto unit of pricing account and primary medium of global exchange.
The dollar, clearly, cannot adequately continue these functions in an era of its own debasement.
But why is the dollar being debased?
The process of monetary creation in the United States is conceptually not that difficult to understand.
Roughly and approximately: the United States Government, through its Treasury, issues IOUs of various sorts.
The United States Federal Reserve System, largely a consortium of private banks, monetizes these IOUs by crediting the US government’s bank accounts in its systems. This monetization of the government’s IOUs is created as public debts loaned at interest.
These debts become the assets of the banking system and the liabilities of the American people for several generations going forward since it is loaned on the full faith and credit of the people’s government as secured by its taxing and tax enforcement powers.
In other words, people pay taxes to pay the interest on their government’s debt. Furthermore, this monetization of the government’s debt largely forms the monetary base upon which the banking system then creates more loans of roughly around ten times their magnitude and more. In sum, the United States borrows its money at interest and then the people pay taxes to finance the interest on these loans.
It remains, of course, a ponderable conundrum why any people’s government, let alone that of the United States, would borrow money from largely private parties who create the money they loan out of nothing and then charge an interest for this service. But that odd mystery is a story for another day.
The basic problem facing the United States today is that America is factually bankrupt.
America’s current unfunded obligations, and its total debt, currently exceed the current measurable annual income generating output of the country by many orders of magnitude.
This is sobering indeed. It must furrow the brows of America’s monetary authorities who are charged with doing something about it.
Given that measurable annual income generating output cannot be increased sufficiently fast to a sufficient magnitude, especially if the liability to eventually pay is growing faster than any practically possible increase in that output, it would appear as if there is an intractable problem of threatening dimensions.
But if the currency is debased by inflating its issuance at a sufficiently fast rate, independent of a commensurate increase in output, perhaps there may be a solution even if that solution is unseemly.
This appears from a distance to be the thinking informing the inner sanctums of monetary policymaking in the United States right now. Dilute the debt by inflating the currency! In the end, there may have to be a new currency. Surprise! Surprise! We did not see this coming.
I personally do think we will see a new currency in the United States in our lifetimes, most likely amalgamated with other currencies in some sort of monetary union for a larger internal market.
We should all prepare now for this possibility because it probably is a probability.
What would be the ultimate effect of the demise of the global currency reserve status of the US Dollar, a process which seems now already underway?
Centralised Economy
Global monetary authority will become centralised and concentrated in global financial institutions practically unaccountable to any sovereign states, even if partially held so accountable by formal mandate.
This centripetal movement of global financial power and de facto global financial governance would further weaken state sovereignty and increase the global power of global financial technocrats whose masters will become even less clear and apparent.
This will mean further loss of effective control of states over their national economies thereby casting the Westphalian state system further into the dustbin of history.
We will then have not a multilateral international system of distributed governance but an increasingly unilateral global system of de facto centralised governance.
The concentration and centralization of global monetary policy in global financial institutions will complete the process of financial globalization thereby completing the process of economic and eventually political globalization.
While I will not take a position here as to whether or not this centralization and concentration of global power is ultimately a good thing or a bad thing, I will here take the position that this historic transition should not pass unnoticed or unencumbered with the most vigourous global debate, with the most observant scrutiny from world citizenry.
We should not hand over our financial and economic, and eventually political, destinies to practically unaccountable global technocrats whose real masters we do not know without fully understanding what that really means for us and what it might lead to for our progeny.
Joseph Edozien is Chairman of the South African New Economics Network.
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