... this is supposedly the first of three parts ...
(snip)"DOLLAR CRISIS IN THE MAKING
Before the stampede
By W Joseph Stroupe
Increasingly ominous clouds are gathering in what could soon be the perfect storm against the United States dollar and against the present dollar-centric global financial order.
This is not shaping up to be a storm that anyone is trying to initiate, not even those who are actively driving for a new global financial order that is no longer centered on the dollar. Instead, it will result from a correlation of forces arising out of the deepening global financial and economic crises, coupled with recurring and conspicuous miscalculation on the part of some of the world's political, financial and economic leaders.
The storm has the potential to cause upheaval on a grand scale, opening the door to swift, and largely uncontrolled, fundamental transformation.
As is widely recognized, the present financial order that is inordinately reliant on the US dollar must some day give way to a new order that is more balanced, stable, resilient and reliable, one that is based on multiple currencies and that therefore won't be plagued by the extremely dangerous structural drawback of an increasingly worrisome elemental single point of failure (the dollar).
But if the current dollar-centric financial order should become more seriously shaken than it already has been, perhaps even suffering a collapse, as a casualty of the present deepening global crisis, then the transition to any new global financial order is most likely to be disorderly, disruptive and unmanageable rather than gradual and orderly.
We can hope - but cannot be at all confident - that world leaders and global investors will act coherently, cohesively and intelligently enough in this crisis so as to ensure that the policies and actions being undertaken will not put at further serious risk the fundamental structure of the current dollar-centric financial order, and that they will instead be effective in bolstering deteriorating global confidence in the present order and in the safety of the dollar, at least until we get through this crisis.
Unfortunately, we cannot be confident that world leaders know what they are doing in seeking to resolve the crisis. Are their measures attacking the heart of the problem, or only its periphery? Are they exacerbating the crisis, either by enacting certain misdirected measures, or by failing to enact certain required measures? Are they setting up conditions that make a dollar crisis and radically increased financial upheaval virtually inevitable, by blindly pushing ahead with a simplistic agenda of trying to spend their way out of the present crisis?
If the dollar is being put at significant short- and medium-term risk by such measures, then we're seriously risking plunging the global financial order into a depth and breadth of transition that we cannot adequately control. "(snip)
(snip)"The stampede in the making
Investors will begin to stampede out of financial assets such as Treasuries and into hard assets like precious metals and certain commodities whose price has been severely beaten down. These will offer comparatively much safer stores of wealth, ones with a real profit potential. China, via its resource buys, is already blazing the trail, going energetically into hard assets, rather than sustaining its 2008 rate of purchases of Treasuries and other financial assets.
Replay the recent histories of the chaotic housing and the commodities bubble bursts. Global investors, at the behest of enthusiastic governments, largely ignored the inevitable risks and piled into these assets on a grand scale, with the hottest interest coming just before the burst occurred. The environment of very low global interest rates and a massive global credit excess set the stage for enormous investor profits on these gigantic and mushrooming asset bubbles.
But when mounting inflation obliged the Fed to begin to steadily hike interest rates, the housing bubble began to burst in late 2006. As the dollar weakened under mounting inflation and loss of its appeal as a safe store of wealth, global investors piled ever faster into commodities for safety and for profit, inflating that bubble to gigantic proportions by the summer of 2008, when oil nearly reached $150 per barrel.
Then, when the global recession emerged later that summer, investors realized global demand and prices for commodities would plunge, so they stampeded out of commodities and into Treasuries, and the commodities bubble burst. Both bubble bursts left a great deal of wreckage in their wakes, with asset values collapsing, pulling businesses, banks and even governments into the abyss.
Though the present Treasuries bubble is more about safety than it is about profit, the fundamental risks associated with bubbles still apply to it. The bigger it gets, and the more reliant upon it as a safe store global investors become, the more unstable it turns out to be because it becomes more sensitive to various factors, both internal and external, both real and psychological.
The bigger and hotter any bubble gets, the more prepared its devotees become to speedily abandon it in favor of the next one. That explains why investors have mostly piled into very short term Treasuries - they know they may well have to sell out even faster than they bought in.
So, no one should assume that the present crisis will moderate or move toward resolution just because global demand for Treasuries might remain high in coming months. That would only signal that the Treasuries bubble is growing more massive, and that the distortions in the global financial order are only becoming more profound and dangerous, threatening to bring in a second wave of destruction, and that the bubble is therefore much nearer to bursting. This constitutes a potential perfect storm against the dollar and against the present global financial order that no one wants, but no one is seeking to prevent either. "(snip)



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