Dollar strength has been driven less by trade imbalances and more by interest rate differentials. A speculating bank for its own book or for a hedge fund client can borrow 3-month Euro Libor at minus0.354% and invest it in 3-month US Treasury bills at 2.36%, for a round trip of over 2.7%. Gear this up ten times or more, either on a bank’s capital, or through reverse repos for annualised returns of over 27%. To this can be added the currency gain, which at times has added enough to overall returns for an unhedged geared position to double the investment.
Not that these forex returns have been guaranteed, but you get the picture. The ECB and the Bank of Japan have been frozen into inactivity, reluctant to raise rates to correct this imbalance, and the punters have known it.
Financial commentators have routinely misunderstood the fundamental reason for the dollar’s strength, attributing it to foreigners’ desperate need for dollars. In fact, non-US holders of dollars hold it in record amounts, with over $4 trillion in deposits in correspondent bank accounts alone, and a further $930 billion in short-term debt.[i] This $5 trillion of total liquidity was the last reported position, as at end-June 2017. Speculative dollar demand since then, driven by interest rate differentials, will have added significantly to these figures. The continuing US trade deficit, currently running at close to a trillion dollars annually, is both an associated and additional source of dollar accumulation in foreign hands.
Meanwhile, the same US Government data source reveals that US residents’ holdings of foreign securities was $6.75 trillion less than the foreign ownership of US securities, and the US Treasury reports that major US market participants (i.e. the US banks and financial entities operating in the spot, forwards and futures contracts) sold a net €2.447 trillion in the first nine months of 2018. Assuming these sales were not absorbed by official intervention on the foreign exchanges or by contracting bank credit, they can only have added to foreign-owned dollar liquidity.[ii]
To summarise the point; far from there being a dollar shortage, as market participants believe, the world is awash with dollars to an extraordinary degree.
The great dollar unwind is now overhanging markets, which will remove the principal depressant on the gold price. And when it begins, as a source of supply these hot-money dollars will be seen as the continuation of escalating supply, with the prospect of future US trade and budget deficits to be discounted. These dynamics are a duplication of those that led to the failure of the London gold pool in the late-sixties, which led to the abandonment of the Bretton Woods gold-dollar relationship in 1971. And as I argue later in this article, the supply of physical liquidity in bullion markets to satisfy demand arising from dollar liquidation is extremely tight.
Geopolitics and gold in 2018
It is likely that at a future date we will look back on 2018 as a pivotal year for both geopolitics and gold. Russia has moved to a position whereby it has substantially replaced its dollar reserves with physical gold. It is now able, if it should care to, to do away with the dollar entirely for its energy exports payments. It is even possible for it to link the rouble to gold.
China took the seemingly innocuous step of launching an oil contract denominated in yuan. It had prevaricated since at least 2014 before making this move, presumably conscious that it was an in-your-face threat to the monopoly of the dollar in pricing energy.
There was expectation that the oil-yuan futures contract would be a segway into a yuan-gold futures contract either in Hong Kong or Dubai, allowing countries such as Iran to avoid receiving dollars entirely. And indeed, a number of gold exchanges and interests in Asia have banded together to open a 1500-tonne vault in Qianhai to facilitate gold storage resulting from pan-Asian trade flows.
These include the China Gold and Silver Exchange Society, the Hong Kong Gold Exchange, and gold market interests in Singapore, Myanmar and Dubai. The objective is to give Hong Kong the opportunity to coordinate Asian gold markets and develop a “gold corridor” for the countries along China’s Belt and Road initiative. Therefore, both private and public sectors will be able to accumulate the oldest form of money as a backstop to local currencies, as an alternative to accumulating those of their trading partners.
Geopolitics evolved from fighting proxy wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, which were effectively won by Russia, to the less obvious war of trade tariffs. President Trump has styled himself as “A Tariff Man”. We have presumed that he is ignorant of economics, but that is no longer the point. Tariffs have evolved from a policy to make America great again to bankrupting China. China is seen as the greatest economic threat to America, and in this duel, tariffs are Trump’s weapon of choice.
The objective is to impede China’s technological development. It was tolerated when China, to steal a line from Masefield’s Cargoes, was the world’s supplier “…of firewood, iron-ware and cheap tin trays”. But China is moving on, creating a sophisticated economy with a technological capability that is arguably overtaking that of America. The battle for technological supremacy came out into the open with the detention on 1 December in Vancouver of Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei. Huawei is China’s leading developer of 5G mobile technology, installing sophisticated equipment around the world. 5G’s capability will make internet broadband redundant and will become widely available from next year.
Ms Meng’s arrest represents such an escalation of deteriorating relations between China and America that many assume it was ordered by rogue elements in America’s deep state. Maybe. But these things are difficult to reverse: does America tell the Canadian authorities to just let her go? It would uncharacteristic for America to admit a mistake, and it would probably need President Trump to personally intervene. This is difficult for him because application of the law is not in his hands.
If Ms Meng is not released, we will enter 2019 with the Chinese publicly insulted. They will realise, if they haven’t already, that ultimately there can be no accommodation with America. Fighting tariffs with more tariffs is a policy that will achieve nothing and damage China’s own economy.
It therefore becomes a matter of time when, and not if, China deploys financial weapons of its own. These will be targeted at the US’s obvious weaknesses, including her dependency on China for maintaining and increasing holdings in US Government debt. The increasingly compelling use of physical gold to both protect the yuan from attack in the foreign exchanges and limit the rise of yuan interest rates would serve to insulate China from the fall-out of a collapsing dollar.
The economic outlook, and the effect on the dollar
For market historians, the economic situation rhymes strongly with 1929, when the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was being debated. Eighty-nine years ago, the first round of votes in Congress was passed on 30 October, and Wall Street fell heavily that month in anticipation of the result. Following the G20 meeting two weeks ago, where it was vainly hoped there would be progress in the tariff negotiations between the US and China, markets fell heavily, reminding market historians of the 1929 precedent.
When President Hoover stated his intention to sign Smoot-Hawley into law on 16 June 1930, Wall Street crashed again. The lesson for today is that equity markets are likely to crash again if Trump continues with his tariff policies. Smoot-Hawley raised import tariffs on over 20,000 imported raw materials and goods, increasing the average tariff rate from 38% to over 60%. The difference today is that instead of tariffs being used only for protectionism, they are being targeted specifically against China.
There will be two likely consequences. The first is the the undermining of financial markets, which in the 1930s led to the virtual collapse of the US banking system and the global depression. And secondly, there is the escalation of a wider financial war raging between China and the US. These two factors are potentially very serious, with stock markets already on shaky ground.
This is not the uppermost reason for market weakness in investors’ minds, who worry about the economic outlook more generally. The conventional credit cycle features rising interest rates as a consequence of earlier monetary expansion, and the exposure of malinvestments. Markets discount the phases of the credit cycle when they become apparent to far-sighted investors, and only indirectly contribute to the collapse itself. But when valuations have become wildly optimistic, the fall in markets becomes a crisis on its own, contributing to the collapse in business that follows. This was the point taken up by Irving Fisher in the wake of the 1929-32 bear market.
In any event, the global economy appears to be at or close to the end of its expansionary phase, and is heading for recession, or worse. As well as the potential impact from an unanchored reserve currency, price inflation in the US will be boosted by Trump’s tariffs, which amount to additional consumer taxes. Price inflation pressures will then call for further rises in interest rates, while economic prospects will point to easing monetary conditions.
We have yet to see how this will be resolved. A further problem is that an economic downturn will increase government welfare commitments and therefore borrowing requirements. Bond yields will tend to rise and therefore borrowing costs, driving spendthrift governments into a debt-trap, just when price inflation is likely to demand higher interest rates. The most likely outcome will be further losses of fiat currencies’ purchasing power.
The 1930s depression saw a rising purchasing power for the dollar, with all commodity and consumer prices declining. The dollar was on a gold standard, and prices were effectively measured in gold, the dollar acting as a gold substitute. This is no longer true, and the purchasing power of the dollar, along with all other fiat currencies will at best remain stable measured against consumer products, or more likely will decline. In other words, a severe recession which looks increasingly likely on cyclical grounds, will lead to higher gold prices, irrespective of fiat currency interest rates...
It is likely that at a future date we will look back on 2018 as a pivotal year for both geopolitics and gold. Russia has moved to a position whereby it has substantially replaced its dollar reserves with physical gold. It is now able, if it should care to, to do away with the dollar entirely for its energy exports payments. It is even possible for it to link the rouble to gold.
China took the seemingly innocuous step of launching an oil contract denominated in yuan. It had prevaricated since at least 2014 before making this move, presumably conscious that it was an in-your-face threat to the monopoly of the dollar in pricing energy.
There was expectation that the oil-yuan futures contract would be a segway into a yuan-gold futures contract either in Hong Kong or Dubai, allowing countries such as Iran to avoid receiving dollars entirely. And indeed, a number of gold exchanges and interests in Asia have banded together to open a 1500-tonne vault in Qianhai to facilitate gold storage resulting from pan-Asian trade flows.
These include the China Gold and Silver Exchange Society, the Hong Kong Gold Exchange, and gold market interests in Singapore, Myanmar and Dubai. The objective is to give Hong Kong the opportunity to coordinate Asian gold markets and develop a “gold corridor” for the countries along China’s Belt and Road initiative. Therefore, both private and public sectors will be able to accumulate the oldest form of money as a backstop to local currencies, as an alternative to accumulating those of their trading partners.
Geopolitics evolved from fighting proxy wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, which were effectively won by Russia, to the less obvious war of trade tariffs. President Trump has styled himself as “A Tariff Man”. We have presumed that he is ignorant of economics, but that is no longer the point. Tariffs have evolved from a policy to make America great again to bankrupting China. China is seen as the greatest economic threat to America, and in this duel, tariffs are Trump’s weapon of choice.
The objective is to impede China’s technological development. It was tolerated when China, to steal a line from Masefield’s Cargoes, was the world’s supplier “…of firewood, iron-ware and cheap tin trays”. But China is moving on, creating a sophisticated economy with a technological capability that is arguably overtaking that of America. The battle for technological supremacy came out into the open with the detention on 1 December in Vancouver of Meng Wanzhou, the CFO of Huawei. Huawei is China’s leading developer of 5G mobile technology, installing sophisticated equipment around the world. 5G’s capability will make internet broadband redundant and will become widely available from next year.
Ms Meng’s arrest represents such an escalation of deteriorating relations between China and America that many assume it was ordered by rogue elements in America’s deep state. Maybe. But these things are difficult to reverse: does America tell the Canadian authorities to just let her go? It would uncharacteristic for America to admit a mistake, and it would probably need President Trump to personally intervene. This is difficult for him because application of the law is not in his hands.
If Ms Meng is not released, we will enter 2019 with the Chinese publicly insulted. They will realise, if they haven’t already, that ultimately there can be no accommodation with America. Fighting tariffs with more tariffs is a policy that will achieve nothing and damage China’s own economy.
It therefore becomes a matter of time when, and not if, China deploys financial weapons of its own. These will be targeted at the US’s obvious weaknesses, including her dependency on China for maintaining and increasing holdings in US Government debt. The increasingly compelling use of physical gold to both protect the yuan from attack in the foreign exchanges and limit the rise of yuan interest rates would serve to insulate China from the fall-out of a collapsing dollar.
The economic outlook, and the effect on the dollar
For market historians, the economic situation rhymes strongly with 1929, when the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act was being debated. Eighty-nine years ago, the first round of votes in Congress was passed on 30 October, and Wall Street fell heavily that month in anticipation of the result. Following the G20 meeting two weeks ago, where it was vainly hoped there would be progress in the tariff negotiations between the US and China, markets fell heavily, reminding market historians of the 1929 precedent.
When President Hoover stated his intention to sign Smoot-Hawley into law on 16 June 1930, Wall Street crashed again. The lesson for today is that equity markets are likely to crash again if Trump continues with his tariff policies. Smoot-Hawley raised import tariffs on over 20,000 imported raw materials and goods, increasing the average tariff rate from 38% to over 60%. The difference today is that instead of tariffs being used only for protectionism, they are being targeted specifically against China.
There will be two likely consequences. The first is the the undermining of financial markets, which in the 1930s led to the virtual collapse of the US banking system and the global depression. And secondly, there is the escalation of a wider financial war raging between China and the US. These two factors are potentially very serious, with stock markets already on shaky ground.
This is not the uppermost reason for market weakness in investors’ minds, who worry about the economic outlook more generally. The conventional credit cycle features rising interest rates as a consequence of earlier monetary expansion, and the exposure of malinvestments. Markets discount the phases of the credit cycle when they become apparent to far-sighted investors, and only indirectly contribute to the collapse itself. But when valuations have become wildly optimistic, the fall in markets becomes a crisis on its own, contributing to the collapse in business that follows. This was the point taken up by Irving Fisher in the wake of the 1929-32 bear market.
In any event, the global economy appears to be at or close to the end of its expansionary phase, and is heading for recession, or worse. As well as the potential impact from an unanchored reserve currency, price inflation in the US will be boosted by Trump’s tariffs, which amount to additional consumer taxes. Price inflation pressures will then call for further rises in interest rates, while economic prospects will point to easing monetary conditions.
We have yet to see how this will be resolved. A further problem is that an economic downturn will increase government welfare commitments and therefore borrowing requirements. Bond yields will tend to rise and therefore borrowing costs, driving spendthrift governments into a debt-trap, just when price inflation is likely to demand higher interest rates. The most likely outcome will be further losses of fiat currencies’ purchasing power.
The 1930s depression saw a rising purchasing power for the dollar, with all commodity and consumer prices declining. The dollar was on a gold standard, and prices were effectively measured in gold, the dollar acting as a gold substitute. This is no longer true, and the purchasing power of the dollar, along with all other fiat currencies will at best remain stable measured against consumer products, or more likely will decline. In other words, a severe recession which looks increasingly likely on cyclical grounds, will lead to higher gold prices, irrespective of fiat currency interest rates...
- Source, James Turk's Goldmoney, read more here
