Dollar to Become World’s ‘Weakest Currency,’ JPMorgan Predicts

Shigeki Nozawa
Bloomberg

The dollar may fall below 75 yen next year as it becomes the world’s “weakest currency” due to the Federal Reserve’s monetary-easing program, according to JPMorgan & Chase Co.

The U.S. central bank, along with those in Japan and Europe, will keep interest rates at record lows in 2011 as they seek to boost economic growth, said Tohru Sasaki, head of Japanese rates and foreign-exchange research at the second-largest U.S. bank by assets. U.S. policy makers may take additional easing steps following the $600 billion bond-purchase program announced this month depending on inflation and the labor market, he said.

“The U.S. has the world’s largest current-account deficit but keeps interest rates at virtually zero,” Sasaki said at a forum in Tokyo yesterday. “The dollar can’t avoid the status as the weakest currency.”

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Pessimism pervades as G20 leaders show sharp split

Jean H. Lee
Associated Press

SEOUL, South Korea — A strong sense of pessimism shrouded the start of an economic summit of rich and emerging economies Thursday, with President Barack Obama and fellow world leaders arriving in Seoul sharply divided over currency and trade policies.

The Group of 20 summit, held for the first time in Asia, has become the centerpiece of international efforts to revive the global economy and prevent future financial meltdowns.

Hopes had been high that the Group of 20 – encompassing rich nations such as Germany and the U.S. as well as growing giants such as China and Brazil – could be the world forum for hashing out an economic way forward from financial crisis.


But agreement appeared elusive as the summit began, divided between those such as United States that want to get China to allow its currency rise and those irate over U.S. Federal Reserve plans to pump $600 billion of new money into the sluggish American economy, effectively devaluing the dollar.

Obama told fellow leaders that the U.S. cannot remain a profligate consumer using borrowed money and needs other countries to pull their weight to fix the world economy.

"The most important thing that the United States can do for the world economy is to grow, because we continue to be the world's largest market and a huge engine for all other countries to grow," Obama said at a news conference.

Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, warned that such policies would "bankrupt" the world.

"If the rich countries are not consuming and want to grow its economy on exports, the world goes bankrupt because there would be no one to buy," he told reporters. "Everybody would like to sell."

Concerns about trade gaps, protectionism and a currency war threatened to overtake momentum for forming global solutions to the financial crisis created at last year's London summit.

So far, officials can't even agree on the agenda, much less a draft statement. Government ministers and senior G-20 officials have labored for days without success to come up with a substantive joint statement to be issued Friday, G-20 summit spokesman Kim Yoon-kyung said.

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The Global Monetary System in Crisis

Bob Chapman
International Forecaster

The recognition of currency war, which has been going on for years, reflects the failure of international cooperation and the failure the G-20 to find a solution of the beggar-thy-neighbor policies of almost every nation. The result has been growing geopolitical dislocation, which G-20 has yet to find a solution for. These efforts, until recently, were turned upside down by the failure of the Copenhagen Summit in the summer of 2009, when it was discovered that global warming was a giant scam. This was proof positive that global leadership was nothing less than a group of common criminals. Economic and financial failure has brought about global austerity measures, and bickering over trade and currencies as well. As this transpired the economies of the US, UK and Europe slid downward in socio-economic, crisis, which in some cases has degenerated into violent demonstrations.

The US and UK are in economic paralysis due to the major changes anticipated in next week’s elections of House and Senate delegates. The President isn’t even going to be in Washington to witness the massacre of the Democrats. He just refuses to deal with it, as a long line of bureaucratic appointees head back to Harvard, foundations, think tanks, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. This as the Chairman of the Fed unveils plan two of quantitative easing, the creation of money and credit out of thin air, which in reality has been going on in the bond market since early June. Another bit of subterfuge dreamed up on Wall Street.


The Fed is monetizing a stimulus plan that the administration is no longer capable of assisting, due to an enraged public. On the other hand, large dollar holders are loudly complaining that the Fed’s policies will cause major inflation and a falling US dollar. Of course, the flip side is if the Fed doesn’t act in this manner the US economy will collapse and with it the world economy. The dumb Chinese, Japanese and oil producers should have long ago accumulated gold and gotten rid of dollars. That was not to be as they in fact enslaved to US leadership by yields and exports. The expenditure of $5 trillion over the next two years by the Fed will only take the US economy sideways at best, and in turn take the dollar to new lower levels. All the insiders know the plan won’t work, but it will buy time, perhaps so they can have another war as a distraction, as they have done many times before in history. Even the public knows it won’t work having been alerted by information pouring out of talk radio and the Internet. The US is already in austerity. Just look at real unemployment of 22-3/4%. This is getting worse not better and that means a change in control in the House and Senate could well bring about a constraining of fiscal and monetary policy.

The US is on a path to socio-political chaos as the dollar falls and the world monetary system comes unglued. Those countries in decent monetary and fiscal condition will pull away from dealing with the US and that has already occurred with Brazil that doesn’t want inflationary dollar investments entering their country, thus, they have implemented a dollar investment tax. The US cannot return to the past. Its leadership lost that opportunity in June of 2003 when they decided to go ahead and take down the economies of the US, UK and Europe in order to force the inhabitants of these countries to accept world government. A main cog in this plan was the implementation of free trade, globalization, offshoring and outsourcing, which has cost the US in just ten years 8.5 million jobs.

There is no chance now of return as countries pull away from US and UK financial markets. These moves will protect these countries for a time, but eventually they will feel the sting of economic failure and instability as trade wars and tariffs become the norm. Washington will cease to be the world leader. The currency and trade wars have only just begun. They could not be avoided by either side. There is about to be a convergence of problems. Things that previously were not connected that will burst forth without warning. That will eventually lead to the implosion of the system.

These factors will be accompanied by social unrest, which we have just seen the beginnings of in Europe. This time of social, monetary and fiscal turmoil will last at least into 2014 before any solutions are put on the table. An easy solution is multilateral revaluation, devaluation and default. This would be very painful, but would stop the power by today’s elites in the US, UK and Europe and the unmasking of their treachery.

Throughout Europe and the US there has and will continue to be a rise in patriotic movements, which those who control governments already have labeled terrorists. These are people like us who bring truth and exposure of facts to the attention of the public.

We are currently facing a new crisis in the US in the mortgage markets and in their securities, which has been aided and abetted by a disintegrating legal system. This comes to real estate at a time when it is on life support. The states cannot be of much assistance because most of them are broke, which is another distinct problem.

The US has already abdicated its role of world leader. Even leadership from Wall Street and banking is dreadful. Worse yet there is no one to take its place, as the world lies adrift in a sea of trouble. The atmosphere is explosive because no one wants to give up anything. The financial markets will all eventually fall and the flight to gold and silver as the only real money will gain acceptance, as we predicted long ago. Americans and others have failed to see the future and they’ll pay dearly for not paying attention.

One of the interesting developments of the new currency wars is a concept that, the nations that will be the most successful, are the nations that devalue the fastest. One of the things nations miss is that the cheap currency that propels exports; also raises the costs of imports. Another fallout is others won’t want to own your currency and if you devalue a currency enough it becomes worthless, or nearly so. A good example of that was in the 1930s where only tariffs were successful. As a rule those tariffs were not steep. The threat, of course, is that nations get mad at one another and war follows.

What these nations have been doing is similar to quantitative easing, or simple fiat creation of money and credit. These actions are the antithesis of sound money.

The Forex, foreign exchange market, trades $4 trillion a day and its projected to trade $10 trillion daily in the next couple of years. Money flows are already wild to say the least. Many foreign currencies have been rising versus the dollar. Some nations such as Brazil have already instituted capital controls by putting taxes on foreign purchases of local sovereign debt. Those not into the foreign game are buying US Treasuries, gold, silver and commodities.

The FOMC and the Fed, even though they know it won’t work, are becoming more and more accommodative. You will get some idea of their plan next week. The result will be a falling dollar, which is not really monetary policy, but grasping at straws in the wind. You will find nothing of sound money here and as a result markets will ultimately not survive. Remember, we could return to the circulation of gold and silver. 76 years ago gold coins were widely circulated and silver was in everyone’s pocket just 47 years ago. It is not impossible. It could happen again over the next few years.

It was just two weeks ago that the dollar revisited 76.54 on the USDX. It had rallied over the past four months from 76.88. It is currently about 77.28. Every time it tries to rally it gets knocked down again. That is a long way from 89 where it was seven months ago. One thing is for sure, as long as we have ill-fated policies such as QE2 the dollar will continue to fall.

We also found it of interest that Bill Gross of PIMCO found the Fed has taken Charles Ponzi one-step further. He says, “Has there ever been a Ponzi scheme so brazen?” No, there has not, said Bill. When the Fed meets next Wednesday it could signify the end of a great 30-year bull market in bonds.

What should be noted is that the Fed is intent on generating another asset bubble to accommodate the sale of Treasury and Agency bonds and to give Wall Street and banking more funds to speculate with. This will renew the elitist wealth effect and in the process send the dollar lower, which in turn will increase inflation, which is already sapping consumer buying. The Wall Street gang plan to use Fed funds to jack up the market, which is already overpriced by 20%, is an act of pyromania. In addition, the average increase in 15 commodities yoy to October is 35%. Food costs are up 48% and energy 23%. Real inflation is up 7%, not the 1.6% the Fed lies about.

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G20 Agreement Gives Emerging Countries More Power in IMF

Lesley Wroughton
Reuters

A G20 agreement to give emerging market countries more power in the International Monetary Fund opens the door for breakthroughs on easing global tensions over trade imbalances.

The surprise deal reached at weekend meetings of finance ministers from the Group of 20 in South Korea shifts IMF voting power to under-represented emerging countries like China, India, Brazil and Turkey.


Countries like the United States are betting that with greater representation emerging economies such as China will be more willing to address the trade distortions causing currency volatility and threatening increased protectionism.


The deal avoided a widening of the gulf between emerging and developed nations and a chaotic ending to a G20 meeting in which the United States failed to convince China and others to agree to targets to limit current account imbalances.

The IMF agreement also spares the G20 from losing credibility, opening the way for G20 heads of state, meeting in Seoul on November 11 and 12, to handle more politically difficult decisions on fixing the trade imbalance problem.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner flew to China on Sunday for further talks with Chinese authorities in the hopes of finalizing a currency deal before the Seoul summit.

Youssef Boutros-Ghali, Egypt's finance minister who heads the IMF's steering policy panel, the International Monetary and Financial Committee, said problems in the world economy could not be addressed without acknowledging the rising clout of emerging economies.

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G20 struggles to find common ground on currency war, triggers US push for trade caps

Finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations struggled to agree on how to prevent a currency war on Friday, with the United States switching tack to focus on a way to rebalance global trade.

G20 Finance Meeting - EPA Photo

Malcom Moore
Telegraph

With China resolutely refusing to allow the yuan to rise more quickly, the US shifted the debate on the first day of the G20 summit to address trade imbalances, the root issue behind exchange rate clashes.

Timothy Geithner, the US Treasury secretary, told G20 members they should commit to specific trade caps, allowing surpluses and deficits on their current account, the broadest measure of trade in goods and services, to be no more than 4pc of gross domestic product.


China's current account surplus was 5.9pc in 2009, having almost halved from its peak of 10.6pc in 2007. The US, by contrast, had a current account deficit of 3pc last year.  In a letter to the G20, Mr Geithner called for a "co-operative effort" on the issue, but said there would have to be "some exceptions" for countries that imported large quantities of raw materials.

The US plan, a way of side-stepping a direct spat over currencies, was backed by Korea, Australia and Canada, but immediately opposed by large exporters such as Japan and Germany.

Rainer Bruederle, the German finance minister, rejected a "command economy" approach, while Yoshihiko Noda of Japan said "setting numerical targets would be unrealistic".

India also said the trade caps would be hard to work out, while Russia said there would be no numerical limits set in the summit's final statement.

Mr Geithner also called for G20 countries to refrain from "either weakening their currency or preventing the appreciation of an undervalued currency". Mr Geithner, who also called for the IMF to monitor the G20's commitments, added: "G20 advanced countries will work to ensure against excessive volatility and disorderly movement in exchange rates."

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IMF sets central bank meeting in Shanghai Monday

Veronica Smith

AFP

WASHINGTON — The International Monetary Fund on Friday said it will hold a high-level conference of central bank governors in Shanghai next week to discuss ways to address the global financial crisis.

The IMF said the conference, scheduled for Monday, would include central bank chiefs and other officials from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North and South America.

The People's Bank of China will host the conference, to be co-chaired by the head of the central bank, Zhou Xiaochuan, and IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Washington-based institution said in a statement.

The US Federal Reserve was expected to be represented by Kevin Warsh, a member of the central bank's policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee.

The Shanghai conference follows on the heels of last week's IMF and World Bank annual meetings, where leading finance officials discussed steps to strengthen the global economy's recovery from the worst recession since World War II and the global financial system.

"The conference is part of the ongoing international examination of the policy challenges posed by the global financial crisis," the IMF said.

Asked about the last-minute timing of the announcement in Washington, just days before the meeting opens in Shanghai, an IMF spokesman told AFP there was "no urgency surrounding this conference."

"This was in planning for a number of months," he said.

In its statement, the 187-nation IMF noted the meeting follows an IMF-sponsored gathering in South Korea of Asian policymakers and opinion leaders in July, at which it "committed to forging a new relationship with the region."

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The currency war is phoney

At the US recession's core is a collapse in investment. America should sort out its own economic policy, not attack China's

John Ross
Guardian

The core of the "currency wars" – in which China has been accused, primarily by the US, of undervaluing the renminbi to boost its exports – is a simple piece of arithmetic. The US has only a quarter of China or India's population.

America can remain the world's largest economy only if average Chinese or Indian living standards never exceed 25% of its own. As – rightly – China and India will never accept this, a peaceful global outcome therefore requires the US to abandon its undesirable and impossible goal.

The immediate political background is September's vote by America's House of Representatives threatening China with tariffs unless it increases the exchange rate of its currency. Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed the legislation was a "key part of our Make It in America agenda", arguing that forcing China to revalue the renminbi, thereby increasing the price of its imports, "could create a million US manufacturing jobs". The dollar's exchange rate then slid as the Federal Reserve accepted quantitative easing – that is, printing dollars – and central banks, including that of Japan, intervened to try to drive down their currencies against the dollar.


Pelosi does not seem to appreciate, however, that the US cannot profitably produce the goods it imports from China. If tariffs were imposed, similar low-price products would be imported from India or Mexico. No American jobs would be created. Indeed, a trade war would lead to a net loss of American jobs. Any country hit by tariffs invariably reciprocates, and China would act against competitive US industries such as farm products and hi-tech.

American politicians are to some degree seeking a scapegoat for domestic problems – the equivalent of Nicolas Sarkozy's anti-Roma campaign. But if the long-term goal of the US to remain the world's largest economy is neither just nor achievable, it can engage with a perfectly legitimate concern – ensuring its population has the highest possible living standards.

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Currency Wars: The Phantom Financial Menace

AgentOgden Illustration

Giordano Bruno
NeitherCorp Press

War, almost every kind of war, is first and foremost a production. A piece of live-action theater with “good guys” and “bad guys” delineated by governments and by media for the benefit of the masses. Most plot-points in most modern conflicts are not genuine. They are written and staged (Gulf of Tonkin, or WMD’s in Iraq anyone?), though we treat the fairytale as if it were reality simply because the story is being told by some corporate mouthpiece wearing a fake smile and a suit on our TV. Very often, we discover after the fact that the wars we witnessed in the dark shadows of our cultural cinema with greasy popcorn and mega-large soda in hand were actually a charade, a farce. We get angry, we get livid, and then we go on with our menial lives because the “damage is done” and what can we do about it now anyway? Very rarely in history do the majority of people have the ability or occasion to see the authentic war going on right in front of their eyes, between the social puppeteers, and those who have broken loose from their strings.

Today, we as Americans have a rare opportunity to step outside the theater, away from the fabricated pageantry of a particular conflict barreling down the horizon, and examine the situation objectively before it fully develops. That conflict is the now increasingly aggressive “global currency war” being readied for implementation and public consumption at this very moment.


For now, the threat of a large scale currency fight is being presented as “minimal” but potentially relevant. In fact, the war has been slowly taking root since at least 2008, right after the initial collapse of the mortgage derivatives bubble when the private Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to near zero and began openly purchasing U.S. Treasury debt. Only this past month has the MSM finally begun discussing the wider implications of these measures, along with the obvious reactions of other nations, including the escalation of trade wars into a full fledged fiat battle royale. But all is not what it seems…

As I hope to demonstrate clearly in this article, not only is the currency war threat utterly unnecessary, irrational, and fiscally pointless, it is also completely engineered to serve a purpose beyond the policy directives of any one sovereign nation, and meant to benefit only a small handful of financial elite…

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The New World Order of Global Markets

Tectonic plates are shifting as emerging markets become major drivers of the developed world.

Bob Lenzner
Forbes

The best minds in finance--George Soros, Mohammed El-Erian, Larry Summers, Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Rubin--were not exactly raving bulls at the Financial Times conference on "The Future of Finance" this week. They were not the force driving the Dow Jones industrial average through 11,000 Friday, rather they were arguing convincingly of the constraints evident in the global economy that are bound to make investing anywhere more difficult and different than ever before.

Martin Wolf and Gillian Tett, FT editors, did a superb job of drawing out the puzzling tensions acutely active in the global economy. Food for thought: Wolf pointed out that China (20%) and India (8%) were both still only small fractions of the GDP of the U.S. In other words, the emerging economies are fast growing midgets versus the slow growing giant. "The potential is unimaginable and vast," said Wolf, "We have never had a low per capita income country with such responsibility and power."

One conclusion was crystal clear: Expect realignments in financial power both globally and nationally. The financial services industry worldwide will never be the same. Asian and Latin American banks survived the storm better than U.S. and European banks. Therefore, the global pecking order among financial institutions is shifting.

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Forex markets on alert as IMF talks fail to gain currency

Foreign exchange markets are braced for fresh turbulence after talks at the IMF failed to ease fears of a currency war

Larry Elliot
Guardian

The world's foreign exchange markets are bracing themselves for fresh turbulence after weekend talks at the International Monetary Fund failed to ease fears of a currency war.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn said the time for talk was over after the fund's main policy body made little progress in settling the row between Washington and Beijing over China's alleged manipulation of its currency.

"The problem is that we can talk and talk and talk," said the IMF's managing director after it released a communique pledging member countries to "move toward a more balanced pattern of global growth, recognising the responsibilities of surplus and deficit countries".

Strauss-Kahn fears a "race to the bottom" as countries seek to depress the value of their currency to export their way out of recession.


He said: "The language is ineffective. The language is not going to change things. Policy has to be adapted. What we need is real action, and I don't believe that this action can be done in another way, in a non-co-operative way."

Finance ministers and central bank governors expressed concern about the deteriorating atmosphere, which has seen Japan weaken the yen and China warn that American demands for a sharp revaluation of the renminbi would lead to social and economic unrest. Last week, the dollar fell sharply against the yen and the euro.

Tim Geithner, the US treasury secretary, kept up the pressure on Beijing following the meeting of the IMF's international monetary and financial committee, the organisation's steering body.

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Currency wars are necessary if all else fails

The overwhelming fact of the global currency system is that America needs a much weaker dollar to bring its economy back into kilter and avoid slow ruin, yet the rest of the world cannot easily handle the consequences of such a wrenching adjustment. There is not enough demand to go around.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Telegraph

Asian investment in plant has run ahead of Western ability to consume. The debt-strapped households of Middle America, or Britain and Spain, can no longer hold up the dysfunctional edifice. Asians must take over, or it will come down on their own heads.

The countries actively intervening in exchange markets to suppress their currencies – China, Japan, Korea, Thailand, even Switzerland, to name a few – are all too often the same ones that have the biggest trade surpluses with the US.

They are taking active steps to prevent America extricating itself from the worst unemployment since the Great Depression, now 17.1pc on the latest U6 index and rising again.

Each country is doing so for understandable reasons: Japan to avoid a deflationary crisis, China to hold together a political order that is more fragile than it looks. In both these cases they are trapped because they clung too long to a mercantilist export strategy, failing to wean themselves off American demand when the going was good.

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