Our rivals are moving away from the dollar as the main world currency, thanks to Biden. China and Russia are teaming up, using the Chinese Yuan. Brazil, France, Iran, India, and the Saudis are all moving away from the dollar. Our currency is being devalued while the price of everything goes up. This erodes our influence in the world and it’s bad for the economy. Spending and inflation are out of control. And Biden is happy about it.
Jesse Watters interviews Peter St Onge Heritage, Foundation economist and Substack columnist.
For nearly 80 years since the end of the Second World War, the U.S. dollar has effectively been the currency of the world for our entire lifetimes. There was virtually no place on the entire globe you could go that would turn down a 20. Andrew Jackson’s face beside the famous seal of the U.S. Treasury was probably America’s best-known export.
From Dar es salaam to Sri Lanka to the smallest gold mining outpost in the Amazon basin. Every shopkeeper on Earth recognized a $20 bill. The dollar was universal and not just universal in commerce, though the majority of international transactions were conducted in dollars, but universally held as a long-term store of value globally.
The world’s central bank stockpiled U.S. dollars far more than any other currency. Now, most Americans may not have known that, or they did, but it doesn’t matter what they knew. It was very good for everyone who lives here. Because there were so many U.S. dollars in circulation outside of the country, the cost of borrowing money inside the country remained artificially low and that’s one of the reasons that in this country, America, middle-class people could buy their own homes. The U.S. government, meanwhile, was able to run up astronomical debts without many obvious consequences.
Now, from time to time, the Congress would debate something called the debt ceiling, but it was abstract. For most people, the entire topic didn’t seem very relevant to their lives because, for most of the time, it really wasn’t. America printed the U.S. dollar. We controlled the global reserve currency and that meant that for us, money was cheap. We had privileges that nobody else in the world had. It’s been very nice, but what would happen if it ended? You don’t even really want to think about that because the consequences would be too ugly, really ugly, but we started to worry about it about a year ago, really the day the Russian military rolled over the Ukrainian border.
Now, by itself, that was a destabilizing event. War always is a destabilizing event. It always challenges the existing order, but it was the West’s reaction to the Russian invasion that seemed too ominous. Policy makers in the U.S. went insane. Joe Biden, helped by his Republican allies in the Senate, appear to be determined not simply to topple the Russian government in some kind of regime change war, but to blow up the postwar economic order that had served the U.S. so generously for so long. So, we thought at the time that the real threat to our future wasn’t just the billions we were sending to Zelenskyy. That was reckless, but probably not going to end America. The real threat was the unprecedented economic sanctions that Joe Biden was allowed to, in fact, encourage to impose. Those sanctions, you’ll recall, were supposed to hurt Russia, but even in March of last year, it seemed obvious they were going to hurt the United States much more than they hurt Russia. Here’s what we said 13 months ago.
We should prepare to lose our position as holder of the world’s reserve currency. That is happening in slow motion. It’s unmistakable. Now, the Biden people seem to have no idea this is going on or maybe they want it to happen. Joe Biden was up there at the State of the Union bragging about how he took 30 points off the Russian ruble in a single day. Hurray. Good for us, but once we stop celebrating our win, the destruction of the Russian economy, they deserve it. You have got to wonder, is there a downside to this? Could it be a pyrrhic victory? Let’s see. These policies have driven Russia, China, India, Turkey and other countries to accelerate their flight from the U.S. dollar. Let’s be clear. That’s the majority of the global economy. This may be the most reckless and destructive thing any American president has ever done to the United States.
So, that was last year and at the time it was really just yelling into the wind. Those views were considered absurd, even treasonous. Biden and his Republican allies described sanctions against Russia as morally essential. We seized oligarchs’ yachts at anchor. We closed the Apple Store in Moscow. We were all assured these were important victories and anyone who has questions what their long-term economic consequences was a Putin stooge. That was the consensus in Washington last spring. …..
…….These sanctions were never going to work in the way they promised because unlike the United States, Russia does not have a late stage financed economy. Russian oligarchs do not get rich from credit default swaps. They get rich from selling actual things that people need in order to live: Oil, natural gas, iron, fertilizer, coal, wheat. By some measures, Russia has the largest resource economy in the world.
From the EJ Antoni And Peter ST Onge article in the Daily Caller:
Joe Biden is dethroning King Dollar in real time. The US dollar’s financial dominance is under siege from a uniquely bad combination of foreign and domestic policies, and Americans should be deeply concerned by the fallout if the dollar loses its 80-year reign as the world’s reserve currency.
In just the past weeks, China conducted the first major LNG sale in renminbi instead of dollars, struck a major deal with Brazil to conduct trade in their own currencies, and just announced the sale of 65,000 tons of LNG to France denominated in yuan. This dovetails with the Biden administration’s inflationary policies and ham-handed sanctions on Russia that accelerated foreigners’ flight from the dollar at the very moment the world doubts if the dollar remains a safe and reliable store of value.
Since the Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 and the petrodollar deal in 1945, the dollar has enjoyed preeminent status around the world, especially for international trade and exchange. This created huge demand for dollars abroad and allowed the US to export inflation, to spend beyond our means and leaving foreigners to soak up the extra.
As the Federal Reserve created billions for the government to spend in the 1960s, it threatened America’s gold reserves. At the time, all major currencies were redeemable for dollars, and dollars were redeemable for gold. When “guns and butter” policy led to a run on gold, President Nixon ended the dollar-gold-exchange standard with what was supposed to be a temporary measure.
Of course, it was as temporary as today’s “transitory” inflation.
Ending the dollar’s link to gold freed the Fed to create yet more money and yet more inflation. While inflation moderated in the early 1980s, it has now returned with a vengeance. Four-decade-high inflation has undermined the dollar’s stability, one of the necessary characteristics of a reserve currency.
A second critical feature of a reserve currency is its apolitical nature. Which Biden is now gutting. After both parties in Washington destroyed the dollar’s stability with inflation, now the Biden administration has chosen to wield the dollar as a weapon. Together, the message to foreigners they should get out while they still can.
In response to Russia’s war with the Ukraine, the US froze the dollar reserves of Russia’s central bank. To be clear, these were not American assets, but were dollars owned by the Russian central bank and the Russian people. The seizure was intended to cause bank runs and collapse Russia’s credit system. It didn’t work.
Instead, it exposed the Biden administration’s willingness to violate the trillions of dollars foreigners rightfully own. The danger of this precedent is difficult to overstate.
……This is not a justification of Putin’s actions, this is about shooting ourselves in the foot. The Biden administration crossed the Rubicon when it weaponized the dollar at a time when it was already teetering from four-decade-high inflation and record levels of debt.
This has given China, our greatest adversary, all the ammunition it needs to launch a worldwide offensive to replace the dollar. It is now making rapid progress.
If the de-dollarization progresses what becomes of the trillions of dollars accumulated around the world since 1944?
If foreigners no longer want them for trade, central bank reserves, private wealth funds, and the official currency of about a dozen countries, all those dollars have nowhere to go but back to us in a flood like our country has never seen. This flood will compete for goods and services in the US against the dollars already here as decades of accumulated trade deficits come flooding back all at once.
The monstrous $1.7 trillion omnibus bill will never be paid off, no matter how many generations try. The energy crisis, skyrocketing gas and food prices, inflation, and the supply chain disaster that led to empty grocery shelves, are all thanks to his inane policies.
Milk: 89 rubles= $1.41
Bread: 60 rubles= .95 cents
1lb ground beef: 175 rubles= $2.78
Eggs: 99 rubles= $1.47
Mushrooms: 79 rubles= $1.25
Total: 499 rubles = $7.92
Gas: 47 rubles per liter= 2,75 a gallon
The most disgusting aspect of this is that the economy of a former Soviet communist empire is doing better than ours. It’s almost as if the roles have switched.