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“Don’t Be Fooled By Recent Strength… A Post-Dollar World Is Coming”
“Don’t Be Fooled By Recent Strength… A Post-Dollar World Is Coming”
The currency may look strong but its weaknesses are mounting…
This month, as the dollar surged to levels last seen nearly 20 years ago, analysts invoked the old Tina (there is no alternative) argument to predict more gains ahead for the mighty greenback.
What happened two decades ago suggests the dollar is closer to peaking than rallying further. Even as US stocks fell in the dotcom bust, the dollar continued rising, before entering a decline that started in 2002 and lasted six years. A similar turning point may be near. And this time, the US currency’s decline could last even longer.
Adjusted for inflation or not, the value of the dollar against other major currencies is now 20 per cent above its long-term trend, and above the peak reached in 2001. Since the 1970s, the typical upswing in a dollar cycle has lasted about seven years; the current upswing is in its 11th year. Moreover, fundamental imbalances bode ill for the dollar.
When a current account deficit runs persistently above 5 per cent of gross domestic product, it is a reliable signal of financial trouble to come. That is most true in developed countries, where these episodes are rare, and concentrated in crisis-prone nations such as Spain, Portugal and Ireland. The US current account deficit is now close to that 5 per cent threshold, which it has broken only once since 1960. That was during the dollar’s downswing after 2001.
Nations see their currencies weaken when the rest of the world no longer trusts that they can pay their bills. The US currently owes the world a net $18tn, or 73 per cent of US GDP, far beyond the 50 per cent threshold that has often foretold past currency crises.
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How the Next Downturn Will Surprise Us
How the Next Downturn Will Surprise Us
In their campaign to contain the risks that caused the Great Recession, central bankers may have planted the seeds for the next global economic crisis.
After the fall of Lehman Brothers 10 years ago, there was a public debate about how the leading American banks had grown “too big to fail.” But that debate overlooked the larger story, about how the global markets where stocks, bonds and other financial assets are traded had grown worrisomely large.
By the eve of the 2008 crisis, global financial markets dwarfed the global economy. Those markets had tripled over the previous three decades to 347 percent of the world’s gross economic output, driven up by easy money pouring out of central banks. That is one major reason that the ripple effects of Lehman’s fall were large enough to cause the worst downturn since the Great Depression.
Today the markets are even larger, having grown to 360 percent of global G.D.P., a record high. And financial authorities — trained to focus more on how markets respond to economic risk than on the risks that markets pose to the economy — have been inadvertently fueling this new threat.
Over the past decade, the world’s largest central banks — in the United States, Europe, China and Japan — have expanded their balance sheets from less than $5 trillion to more than $17 trillion in an effort to promote the recovery. Much of that newly printed money has found its way into the financial markets, where it often follows the path of least regulation.
Central bankers and other regulators have largely succeeded in containing the practice that caused disaster in 2008: risky mortgage lending by big banks. But with so much easy money sloshing around in global markets, new threats were bound to emerge — in places the regulators aren’t watching as closely.
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