Investor confidence has dropped after the U.S. sovereign debt rating was cut by Standard & Poor’s on Aug. 5, and amid worsening public debt problems in Europe.[...]
The Bank of Mauritius is seeking to limit its foreign reserve exposure to the U.S. dollar and the euro and will diversify to include more holding from trade partners such as China, India and South Africa.
[...]
“We want to move away from dollar-based trade into yuan- based trading with China and rupee-based trading with India. Likewise with the South Africans with whom we trade a lot,” Bheenick said. “We want to have direct trading, trying to bypass the dollar channel and the euro channel.”
Nigeria's central bank plans to diversify its foreign exchange reserves away from an over-reliance on the dollar and wished to increase its exposure to the Chinese yuan among other currencies, its deputy governor told Reuters on Saturday.
Beijing should move rapidly to diversify its foreign exchange reserves, buying more euro and yen rather than dollar assets, after U.S. debt was downgraded by one rating agency, a paper run by China's central bank cited local banking sources as saying."China can keep buying yen and euro; and in the dollar assets, China can cut its holdings of treasuries and institutional bonds for U.S. stocks and corporate bonds," an unidentified "expert" with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the largest Chinese lender, was quoted by the Financial News as saying.
The newspaper report does not necessarily represent China's official stance. China's central bank and State Administration of Foreign Exchange, which manage China's stockpile of $3.2 trillion foreign exchange reserves, the world's largest, have kept silent since the first credit downgrade of U.S. debt.
We shall see.
A Second Look at the Federal Reserve
(2002 – G. Edward Griffin)
Installment 4
Chapter 5
Regular type indicates text directly quoted from the book. Where the words are my own, type will be italicized.
We have been told that our nation’s trade deficit is a terrible thing, and that it would be better to “weaken the dollar” to bring it to an end. Weakening the dollar is a euphemism for increasing inflation. In truth, America is not hurt by a trade deficit at all. In fact, we are the benefactors while our trading partners are the victims. We get the cars and TV sets while they get the funny money. We get the hardware. They get the paperware.
There is a dark side to the exchange, however. As long as the dollar remains in high esteem as a trade currency, America can continue to spend more than it earns. But when the day arrives – as it certainly must – when the dollar tumbles and foreigners no longer want it, the free ride will be over. When that happens, hundreds of billions of dollars that are now resting in foreign countries will quickly come back to our shores as people everywhere in the world attempt to convert them [...] and to do so as quickly as possible before they become even more worthless.
The chickens will come home to roost. But, when they do, it will not be because of the trade deficit. It will be because we were able to finance the trade deficit with fiat money created by the Federal Reserve.
And then we get into the global business with both feet through the magic money workings of the IMF and World Bank, which apparently is mostly funded by US dollars.
Funding for [World Bank] loans comes from member states in the form of a small amount of cash, plus promises to deliver about ten-times more if the Bank gets into trouble. The promises, described as “callable capital,” constitute a kind of FDIC insurance program, but with no pretense at maintaining a reserve fund.
Based upon the small amount of seed money plus the far greater amounts of “credits” and “promises” from governments of the industrialized countries, the World Bank is able to go into the commercial loan markets and borrow larger sums at extremely low interest rates. After all, the loans are backed by the most powerful governments in the world which have promised to force their taxpayers to make the payments if the Bank should get into trouble.
Suddenly, I’m seeing what they mean by “too big to fail.” But I’m afraid they might be wrong.
I’m wading through chapter 5, and this may be where I got stopped in my previous attempt to read this book. Wading, maybe is not the right word, but somehow I’m trying to glean the bare facts from the author’s constant rants against socialism. He wants to abolish the Fed, among other reasons, because it supports totalitarian dictators by loaning money to third world countries.
In my other readings of the World Bank/IMF “evils” the story is that it loans money to countries against faked positive assessments of those countries' abilities to pay it back, thereby keeping them in the perpetual business of paying interest and unable to ever get out of debt and get their economies on sound footing. A number of Latin American countries have finally caught on and are pulling out of their IMF loans, with the help of financing from Venezuela, I believe. I think this is a much more reasonable view of what’s going on than that the IMF is “brothers under the skin to socialist dictators” as the author of this book claims.
The author continues in chapter 6 ranting about the “New World Order” and how it’s all socialism and communism. So I think I will skip that and pick up again (when I pick up again) in Section II – A Crash Course On Money - Chapter 7, where it should get interesting again.
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