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U.S. Dollar Meltdown Currencies / US Dollar Nov 10, 2009 - 12:42 AM By: Mike_Shedlock I had the pleasure of reading a final finished copy of The Dollar Meltdown by Charles Goyette this past week. Congressman Ron Paul offers an opinion on the front cover to which I certainly concur: "Goyette does a great job explaining why America faces a looming financial crisis and outlines commonsense strategies for individuals to protect themselves and their families. This book truly is a must read." Before publication, I read a preliminary copy which explains this quote on the back jacket "The Dollar Meltdown...

In the current fiscal year alone, the U.S. Congress and the administration have created a federal deficit of $1.4 trillion — more than TRIPLE the size of America's largest deficit in history. Worse, they now admit that the cumulative deficits through 2019 will be at least $9 trillion, and that they have no plan in place to reduce this monster in our midst. This is the greatest threat to your financial future of all time. As experts like Warren Buffett have noted, the only way Washington politicians know how to solve the debt crisis is by creating inflation. They are...

Watching The USD Drop? Here's What You Should Really Be Watching Shishir Nigam November 09, 2009 The USD vs the JPY is weakest in years. Yes, the DXY dollar index has been hitting new lows around 74. Yes, US government debt and deficits (the 2 infamous “D”s) have been skyrocketing and are projected to keep on growing in the coming years. Yes, the printing presses started by Ben Bernanke might be running faster than most people are comfortable with. And yes, the coming inflation will lead to further devaluation of the dollar which the government will not attempt to stop...

Dollar Reached 15-Month Low In Wake Of G20 MeetingEuro presses back above $1.50 Deborah Levine & William L. Watts MarketWatchNov. 9, 2009, 3:43 p.m. EST NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- The dollar fell to the lowest level in 15 months against a basked of currencies on Monday after a weekend meeting of Group of 20 policy makers stressed continued economic stimulus, encouraging investors to move into riskier assets such as stocks and away from the dollar. Traders also took heed of an International Monetary Fund report issued at the G20 meeting that said the dollar has moved closer to "medium-term equilibrium"...

The Problems With “Printing Your Way Out Of Debt” By Bill Bonner 11/07/09 Beunos Aires, Argentina – Governments are running breathtaking deficits…and accumulating alarming debts. Japan has a national debt of nearly 200% of its GDP. Where did that debt come from? It came from 20 years of trying to buy its way out of a slump with borrowed money. Of course, it didn’t work. But now, Britain and America are following the Japanese lead…and the Japanese are still at it! At the present rate, Japan’s government debt will grow to 300% of GDP in 10 years. America’s debt could...

When The U.S. Dollar Rallies, The Stock Market Will Crash Currencies / US Dollar Nov 04, 2009 - 07:03 PM By: Mike_Whitney Interest rates. The Fed does not need slinky women in plunging necklines to peddle money. All it needs is low interest rates. When rates are pushed lower than the rate of inflation, the Fed provides a subsidy for borrowing. This is not as hard to grasp as it sounds. If I offered to give you $1.00 for very 90 cents you gave me in return, you would buy as many dollars from me as you could. The Fed...

Is the U.S. Dollar About To Crush Stocks? Currencies / US Dollar Nov 02, 2009 - 07:00 AM By: Graham_Summers Long-time readers know that I’ve begun to develop a love/hate relationship with the US Dollar. On one hand I believe the US currency is horribly flawed given our unserviceable debt load and the Fed’s profligate spending. However, on the other hand, to make money investing you have to be willing to go against the crowd. And with less than 3% of investors currently bullish on the US Dollar, the contrarian in me can’t help but wonder if we have the...

U.S. Dollar Crash Is Not Going To Happen Currencies / US Dollar Oct 22, 2009 - 01:26 AM By: Mike_Whitney The dollar is not going to crash. In fact, many economists believe that the dollar will rally when the Fed ends its quantitative easing program (QE) sometime in early 2010. The Fed is on track to buy nearly $2 trillion dollars of mortgage-backed securities, US Treasuries and agency debt. In other words, the Fed is printing money and pumping it into the housing market to keep the market from collapsing. This keeps interest rates low, but it also weakens the...

Dollar Hegemony For Another Century By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard October 21st, 2009 Let me stick my neck out. The dollar will still be the world’s dominant reserve currency in 2030, sharing a degree of leadership in uneasy condominium with the Chinese yuan. It will then regain much of its hegemonic status as the 21st century unfolds. It may indeed end the century even stronger than it was at the start. The aging crisis in Asia — and indeed the outright demographic implosion in Japan and China, not to mention China’s water crisis — will soon be obvious to everybody. Talk of...

China, Russia, Japan & France are working with oil producers in the Middle East to permit currencies other than the U.S. $ to be used to pay for oil. This basket of currencies will include the Japanese Yen, the Chinese Yuan, and the €. It is reported in leading U.K. newspapers that this payment may be in a ‘new' currency that is made up of these currencies. It is also reported that a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar would form part of this ‘basket' While we...

THE US government has $52 billion stashed away that hasn't yet been spent! Quick, call President Obama's bookkeepers. How'd they miss this? A year ago, that amount would have caused at least a wow, or maybe even a holy cow. And my first sentence above would have deserved the exclamation point I jokingly put at the end of it. But these days, when it costs $787 billion to put a TARP over bad bank assets, an astounding $700 billion just to attempt an economic rescue and $3 billion simply to lure people into new car showrooms, that $52 billion is...

Debt Spiral Financial Holocaust Fiat Currencies Zero Bound, The Next Down Leg Stock-Markets / Stocks Bear Market Oct 18, 2009 - 11:10 AM By: Ty Andros The demise of the G7 financial systems, currencies and economies continues to march along as incomes collapse. The social welfare states and their banking system’s Ponzi finance-based economies are BROKE, their obligations and promises irredeemable and unpayable. A debt spiral is in full view, irreversible with policymakers unable or unwilling and opposed to making the changes required to CREATE PRIVATE SECTOR INCOME GROWTH and control SPENDING, and which must be done to avert the...

Trade wars could break out. Overexposed banks might collapse. And that's just for starters

The G-20 meeting last week was hoped to be a watershed for the global economy. It was hoped that accepted that there has to be a global solution to the financial crisis that triggered the credit crunch and the worldwide recession. Those solutions had to include the full cooperation of other key governments, including China, before we could hope for a sound recovery of the global economy. If we have more superficial statements with no real action, expect yet another crisis as confidence is lost, not only in currencies, but in global money systems. You all know the old adage,...

It's not national security. It's not Charlie Rangel. It's ... the currency. Try as hard as you can, but you're likely to fail unless you get a principal in front of a camera -- and even then -- no one wants to talk about the dollar or its future. That's because no group of citizens of the earth are more twitchy than currency traders -- and how many dominoes can be knocked over by a single twitch is kind of scary. Banks of Central Asia, of China, of Russia, and of Europe can move billions on a sentence from the...

LONDON (AFP) - The dollar hit a 14-month low against the euro Thursday on fears that US interest rates would remain super-low for a long time and as a stock market rally sparked appetite for riskier assets, traders said.

Amos 8:5 ". . . Saying, When will the new moon be gone, that we may sell corn? and the sabbath, that we may set forth wheat, making the ephah small, and the shekel great, and falsifying the balances by deceit?"

[snip]In case anybody checked, the dollar's path has been steadily downward since the early years of the administration of George W. Bush. And, notwithstanding the bleating you hear about the battered buck, that's just fine with Wall Street. According to Barclays Capital, "since 2003, dollar weakness has gone hand-in-hand with equity rallies." The bank's economists estimate currency depreciation helped to reduce the trade deficit, which added 1.1 percentage points to gross domestic product growth in the first half of 2009 from a year earlier. From the stock market's perspective, Barclays Capital notes in its U.S. Portfolio Strategy weekly letter that...

The state of the dollar probably hasn’t been a first-tier political issue in the United States since, say, the presidential election of 1896. Back then, it manifested as whether or not America would stay on the gold standard or switch to a bimetallic one. (The William Jennings Bryan “cross of gold” speech and all that.)

The dollar's position as the world's leading reserve currency faces increased pressure as the financial crisis allows emerging economies greater influence on the world stage, analysts said. A report last week in The Independent claiming that China, Russia and Gulf States are among nations prepared to ditch the dollar for oil trades has heightened the uncertainty surrounding the US currency's future.

I ran across this graph at CampaignForLiberty.com which I think every American should view. A picture is worth a thousand words and this one illustrates what the Federal Reserve System, aided and abetted by the Federal Government's deficit spending policies, have caused. There is good reason why this country has undergone another economic tsunami which will lead to eventual economic suicide. The only one way to prevent this from happening is to recognize the event that caused it and then attempt to reverse it. In 1913 the 16th Amendment to the Constitution abrogating the original words "no capitation, or other...

'Benign Currency Neglect' Could Spell Real Danger For US EconomyWhat's happening to the dollar? That's the question dominating the world's financial markets. Last week the US currency fell, on a trade-weighted basis, to a fresh 14-month low. The dollar's decline is now gaining momentum. By Liam Halligan Published: 7:22PM BST 10 Oct 2009 Many American economists say the greenback is falling because the global economy is recovering – so investors no longer need the dollar as a "safe haven". That's nonsense. The reality is that "safe haven" status has shifted away from the dollar and towards tangible assets that the...

Since Nixon severed gold from the greenback in 1971, the dollar's comparative value has fallen 97%. Money printing today will only hasten the currency's destruction. I was recently thinking about what has transpired in this country in the past decade: first the equity bubble, then the real estate/credit bubble and the steady debasement of the dollar (where a trickle of trouble threatens to turn into a flood). I have been struck by how few people seem to understand how all these events are related -- in that, at the root, they each have the irresponsible printing of money as the...

Rumors are flying that secret meetings are taking place between Arab states, China, Russia, Japan and France, to dump the dollar and replace the U.S. currency’s role in the pricing of oil. The dollar fell against the euro, yen and Swiss franc, while gold hit new highs of $1,041 an ounce. Is there any truth to the rumors that the dollar is being replaced by a basket of foreign currencies, and what will be the impact your investments and the U.S. economy?

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The dollar staged a modest rebound on Friday after comments from Federal Chairman Bernanke led to speculation that the US might make an early exit from unconventional monetary policy. Bernanke said on Thursday that the Fed had the apparatus and the ability to recover the cash and loans to the financial system over the past year, signalling that it had its exit strategy worked out. BUT the Fed balance sheet and money supply hasn't grown since the first quarter of '09. So, Bernanke is likely blowing smoke here for the financially clueless who have never read the M2 data repoted...

The sun may come out tomorrow but is anybody betting their bottom dollar that the dollar may find a bottom tomorrow? Come, what may the dollar has been the major influence on the petroleum prices and yesterday if only for a moment the dollar took a back seat to a wildly bearish Energy Information Agency oil inventory report. Still with the dollar taking another drubbing overnight the question is, can anyone save the dollar?

Soros...ok, we've all talked about MoveOn.org, Soros shorting currencies, hating Israel, hating the US, backing Obama, ACORN, etc. But, I was just wondering is there any "official effort" to track his dealings, that is, trying to put together a paper trail of his shorting currencies, ruining the US with his financial "bets", etc.? Am I the only one who would love to see such a thread outlining what dealings he has done and what damage it inflicted?

"What the Fed is likely to do is kill the dollar and eventually partner with the IMF, which as become the de facto global central banking institution. The IMF will fund global growth through Special Drawing Rights. The trick will be for the dollar to slowly die as the Special Drawing Rights gradually play a more and more central role in the growth of the world economy. A perfect correlation of the dollar fall and the Special Drawing Rights rise is not likely, so there will be a very difficult transition period when the United States is essentially a country...

Overnight, the U.S. dollar continued to fall against most Asian currencies, prompting a wave of foreign-exchange intervention by central banks in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and Thailand. Things are really bad when the Philippines is propping up the dollar. The Philippines! These declines are really hard to stop, near impossible. Is this the the start of the tsunami wall of dollars that could hit markets? Remember a panic out of the dollar is unlike any other currency panic we have seen. As the defacto international reserve currency (though obviously slipping from that status), every country, every international corporation is...

Oil prices rose above $70 a barrel Thursday in Asia amid a weakening U.S. dollar and mixed crude inventory data. Benchmark crude for November delivery was up 62 cents at $70.19 by midday Singapore time in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. The contract lost $1.31 to settle at $69.57 on Wednesday. A slide in the U.S. dollar has helped bolster oil prices, which are traded in the American currency. The euro rose to $1.4758 on Thursday from $1.4687 the previous day, and the dollar slipped to 88.30 yen from 88.60. Investors were also mulling mixed signals in...

The sharp fall in the US dollar is giving ammunition to the critics of the Obama administration and fuelling broader concerns about the erosion of America’s reserve currency status. Republican politicians have highlighted the dollar’s slide as evidence of waning US power. On Wednesday, Sarah Palin, the Republican former vice-presidential candidate, added her voice to those who have expressed concern over the consequences of rising US indebtedness and dependence on foreign oil. “We can see the effect of this in the price of gold, which hit a record high today in response to fears about the weakened dollar,” she wrote...

The Autumn 2009 Inflation Time Bomb Economics / Inflation Oct 07, 2009 - 03:18 PM By: Paul_Tustain It's not only the energy markets that threaten the 'low inflation' data now encouraging bondholders to keep buying... THE PUBLISHED INFLATION DATA are surprisingly unsophisticated in so far as they compare current prices with a snapshot a year earlier. Just over a year ago, oil was every hedge fund manager's favorite speculation. In summer 2008 a barrel got to well over $140, before falling sharply back. That summer's high oil price had the effect of cancelling out the deflation which was occurring elsewhere...

China Defaults, Currency Basket Threatens Dollar TSF – October 6, 2009 By Janet Tavakoli Robert Fisk exposed revived discussions by the Gulf States, China, France, Japan, Brazil, and Russia to replace the dollar as the benchmark oil trading currency with a basket of currencies including gold within 10 years. This proposal is not new and discussions have been ongoing for decades. But other extraordinary moves in the capital markets suggest we should take this threat to the dollar’s position very seriously. For example, China has $2.3 trillion in currency reserves (about 70% in dollars), and China knows how to get...

The U.S. dollar continued its six-month slide Tuesday amid a growing international chorus that wants the dollar replaced -- or at least supplemented -- as the world's reserve currency, a move that would end the greenback's six decades of global dominance. The dollar has come under attack from abroad as the economic crisis has played out, thanks to the Federal Reserve's decision to flood a seized-up financial system with liquidity last fall. The central bank's moves likely staved off deflation, but the massive influx of new dollars has devalued existing ones. Foreign nations are worried that the massive U.S. national...

If you’ve seen the movie Thelma and Louise, you’ll never forget the ending: In the last scene, the two main characters head down a dirt road in their top-down convertible. The road dead-ends at a very high cliff. The last picture of the movie shows the car in a dramatic free-fall off the cliff. That ending is a perfect metaphor for the fate of the United States dollar. Our currency is headed for a free-fall off a cliff in the international foreign-exchange markets. Why is this almost a certainty? Consider the following: At no other time in our nation’s...

Greenback fell further after the G-7 would not come to the rescue. The Group of Seven will let the dollar fall. The heated climate before the Istanbul meeting led some to expect global policymakers to take a stand, but despite the strong tone, Andrew Wilkinson, senior market analyst at Interactive Brokers, said it was short on action. "It invites investors to test the dollar's lines of resistance in order to see what response, if any, might be forthcoming in the event of a further fall in the value of the dollar," Wilkinson said. The dollar's loss of value over the...

I called my brokerage accounts today, Fidelity and Scottrade and neither handles other currencies. How does one tranfer monies to other currencies. Is it only for the rich and super rich with off shore accounts? Can a little Jane do it too? Are there any financial freepers who could weigh in?

ARAB STATES LAUNCH SECRET MOVES WITH CHINA, RUSSIA, FRANCE TO STOP USING DOLLAR FOR OIL TRADING... DEVELOPING...

ARAB STATES LAUNCH SECRET MOVES WITH CHINA, RUSSIA, FRANCE TO STOP USING DOLLAR FOR OIL TRADING... DEVELOPING...

Euro Pacific Capital head Peter Schiff predicts the Dow will fall another 90 percent from current levels when measured against gold, which he says will hit $5,000 an ounce. Schiff credits poor policy decisions over the past nine years for setting the U.S. dollar up to take a major fall against commodities and other currencies when China and Japan finally stop buying our debt. "Ben Bernanke is keeping his record of perfection intact of never getting anything right,” Schiff told Yahoo! Tech Ticker. “Once again he's gotten it wrong." "If the Fed really thought the economy was sound, why does...

Gold Tells You U.S. Bubble Hasn’t Popped Yet: Alice Schroeder

Sprinkled among all the official talk about efforts to end the current recession, you'll hear assurances, notably from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, that when the economy does revive, it won't be allowed to blast off into runaway inflation. The Fed, we're being promised, will prevent such a launch by reabsorbing the hundreds of billions of dollars of excess liquidity it recently created to halt the credit crisis. Delivering on those assurances won't be easy. There is no reliable, real-time guide to how much cash the economy needs, so deciding when to drain excess reserves from the banking system (by...

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered the replacement of the US dollar by the euro in calculating the value of the country's Oil Stabilisation Fund (OSF). The edict, issued on Sept 12, follows a recommendation by the trustees of the country's foreign reserves, Iran's English-language daily The Tehran Times said on Monday, citing Iran's semi-official Mehr News Agency. The move was taken because the government wishes to protect itself from the fragility of the US economy and the weak dollar.

One of the world's largest banks is bidding farewell to the U.S. dollar – just as the dollar faces intense scrutiny at today's G-20 summit and the United Nations announces it wants a new global reserve currency replacement. "The dollar looks awfully like sterling after the First World War," David Bloom, HSBC currency chief, told London's Telegraph. "The whole picture of risk-reward for emerging market currencies has changed. It is not so much that they have risen to our standards, it is that we have fallen to theirs. It used to be that sovereign risk was mainly an emerging market...

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pulls new world currency from his pocket Russia's President, Dmitry Medvedev, pulled the world's new currency from his pocket at the meeting of G8 leaders in the Italian city of Aquila. 4:38PM BST 10 Jul 2009 The future of the dollar was one of several subjects debated at the G8 summit Mr Medvedev, who has been seeking ways to displace the dollar as the world's dominant reserve currency, produced a sample coin of what he described as a 'united future world currency'. “Here it is,” Mr Medvedev said, according to Bloomberg. “You can see it and...

Two charts and three measures of gold's "real" price today... GOLD'S CURRENT price-tag of $1,000 an ounce suggests big doubts over the US Dollar, its domestic economy, and its status as the world's No.1 reserve currency. Or so we guess after 10 years of watching it quadruple from two-decade lows. But gold investors (old, new and everywhere) should note that this decade's bull market in bullion is about much more than the greenback. Here are three ways of judging what you might call the "real price of gold" instead. #1. The Global Gold Index Gold has risen against all world...

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One-thousand Federal Reserve Notes per troy ounce! This past week gold edged over $1000 to close at its highest levels ever witnessed. This much-maligned investment has nearly quadrupled since its secular bull's humble beginnings in April 2001, a fantastic 297% gain compared to the S&P 500's pathetic 7% loss over this 8+ year span. With gold being the best-performing major asset of this decade, and now surpassing the once-unthinkable $1000 mark, many investors are growing wary of its future prospects. Is gold too high today? Are $1000+ levels unsustainable? Is gold's secular bull nearing its end after this metal's epic...

Here's your chance to let the media know where the people stand on our faith in God, as a nation.. NBC is presently taking a poll on "In God We Trust" to stay on our American currency.Do your part and tell them what you think.