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Ousting the Greenback: USD Still King as BTC and CBDCs Mount Challenge

Ousting the Greenback: USD Still King as BTC and CBDCs Mount Challenge

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4 years ago

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The advent of digital money will threaten the U.S. dollar’s global dominance, but it won’t be easy to dethrone the current global reserve currency.

The global monetary system has been centered around the United States dollar since at least the end of World War II when the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement formalized the greenback’s ascent to unchallenged dominance. Control over the world’s reserve currency came hand in hand with a boost to the nation’s already enormous geopolitical influence, as well as the ability to run huge deficits at low cost.

Today, a growing chorus of experts believe that the dollar’s hegemony might be in a decline. America’s diminishing share of world trade, the expansion of China’s monetary power and the anticipated digitization of national currencies can all potentially erode the foundations of the incumbent financial order. So, what role could prospective central bank digital currencies and decentralized currencies such as Bitcoin (BTC) play in shaping the new international monetary system?

America’s exorbitant privilege

One of the most common terms to denote the U.S.’s outsize influence on international trade is “monetary hegemony,” which first appeared in Super Imperialism, a 1972 book by the economist Michael Hudson. Almost half a century after its publication, many of the ideas articulated in it still hold true.

As of this year, close to 60% of all foreign exchange reserves are still allocated in the dollar. Furthermore, around 40% of world trade is invoiced and settled in dollars, in addition to its 88% share of worldwide forex trades.

Being in a position to mint the currency that serves as the world’s unit of account comes with a slate of perks, putting the U.S. in a position of so-called exorbitant privilege. For one, because it pays for imported goods with its own national currency, the monetary hegemony faces no balance of payments constraint. This means that it’s not at risk of losing the ability to pay for essential imports or finance its current account deficit.

Being the largest debtor nation in the world, the U.S. has taken full advantage of the dollar’s position. As all parties engaged in international trade — governments, corporations and banks — are always in need of dollar liquidity, the market has a near-infinite capacity for new dollar-denominated debt. For decades, the U.S. has been spending way beyond its means, thanks to this simplified access to cheap international credits.

Additionally, this position of monetary dominance provides tremendous geopolitical leverage. By denying adversary nations access to the dollar-centered global financial system, the U.S. can inflict damage comparable to — or even beyond — that of a military intervention. Economic sanctions have long been a primary instrument of exerting pressure on nations deemed “rogue” by the State Department.

Shifting tides?

As Obama-era Treasury Secretary Jack Lew once warned, the centrality of the dollar to the global financial system hinges on other nations’ willingness to play by its current rules. In order to maintain the monetary status quo, Lew argued, the U.S. must not overuse economic sanctions in order to maintain the impression that these measures are only deployed against foreign governments for appropriate reasons and with sufficient justification.

The current administration has paid little heed to these words. President Donald Trump has ramped up the use of sanctions and other financial restrictions against states such as Iran and China, weaponizing U.S. economic power to a new level. As the economist Jeffrey Sachs argued, this has led to the formation of a counter-coalition of disgruntled nations, with China and Russia at the helm, that have accelerated their efforts to de-dollarize their economies. According to Sachs, this geopolitical shift, combined with the shrinking share of the U.S. economy in the global gross domestic product, could spell the dollar’s decline as the world’s reserve currency.

Steve Kirsch, the CEO of the digital currency platform M10, is on board with Sachs’s assessment of the dollar’s current international standing. Kirsch told Cointelegraph that “President Trump is arguably the biggest force driving the rest of the world away from the USD and seeking an alternative.”

At the same time, most experts agree that the potential demise of the dollar’s reserve-currency status is a rather distant prospect. Even amid the current pandemic-induced economic turmoil accompanied by a massive injection of dollar liquidity by the Federal Reserve, the markets’ faith in the incumbent reserve currency seems largely unfaltering. Marc Fleury, the co-founder and CEO of financial technology company Two Prime, commented to Cointelegraph:

“In times of turmoil, the U.S. still shoulders a lot of responsibility and enjoys good will. The country’s recent disgraces are irrelevant to this financial reality. The green back may be tired, but it is still mighty. The more we print dollars, the more it rallies.”

Centralized digital alternatives

One of the major reasons why the dollar’s hegemony persists is inertia inherent to the gigantic system of international trade. Since all the parties involved in it have been relying on the dollar for decades, one cannot simply decide to opt for an alternative, especially if it does not provide significant efficiency gains compared with the old ways. However, the impending rise of CBDCs could pose a feasible threat to the greenback’s status precisely because they could offer a faster and more convenient medium of exchange.

Some observers note that China might have the best shot at challenging the dollar’s dominant position if it successfully leverages both its expanding economic influence and the usability of its prospective digital currency infrastructure. Omri Ross, the chief blockchain scientist at multiasset trading platform eToro, commented to Cointelegraph:

“While the Chinese economy still trails behind the Western world in most per person measures in the short term, an aggressive expansionary approach to innovation in physical and digital infrastructure coupled with substantial investments in emerging markets has positioned the impending ‘digital yuan’ as a natural contender to the dollar.”

Ross added that mounting a successful monetary challenge to the U.S. would enable the Chinese government to exercise unrestrained influence on multilateral trade agreements, evade sanctions and even influence the balance of arms. Two Prime’s Fleury thinks that with the rise of China’s digital currency, two major power centers could emerge in the global monetary system, with some other national currencies close behind: “At a minimum, we will see a bipolar world banking system, with USD and Chinese Yuan denominations. The EUR/JPY may also be particularly important.”

Yet another alternative vision that the world’s central bankers are pondering is a global public cryptocurrency underlain by a basket of national currencies, a design that Mark Carney, a former governor of the Bank of England, referred to as a “synthetic hegemonic currency.”

Related: CBDCs With a Twist: The Public-Private Solutions Needed for Adoption

Although the rise of CBDCs appears unavoidable at this point, there are clear limits to the amount and kind of change these centrally controlled assets can bring about. John Deacon, the financial services lead at blockchain firm Dragon, told Cointelegraph:

“Their [CBDCs’] ability to disrupt the global status quo of the monetary system will be limited by the current increase in localization (due to trade wars and coronavirus), and by the need to protect their local banking sector. This opens up a niche for a non-CBDC digital currency (i.e. one that is not partisan to or affected by economic or trade policies of a single country or bloc) to serve as a store of value and medium of exchange.”

Regardless of whether a single state’s currency is paper-based or digital, it remains beholden to the national and international agenda of the nation’s government, argued Ido Sadeh Man, the founder of the cryptocurrency firm Saga Monetary Technologies, adding:

“We could see decentralized digital currency rise to prominence as the denomination of reserves — it is very possible. [...] Imagining the future global monetary system, today, feels like a forked road: either we continue to layer technology onto a flawed system, or; we unleash and experience the full capabilities of technology to redesign and strengthen the global monetary model.”

A blueprint of a decentralized reserve currency

In a scenario where the dollar remains the global monetary hegemon or even one where another national currency eventually takes its place, the nation in charge of the world’s unit of account will still be able to leverage its status through it. The uncoupling of monetary dominance from geopolitical power looks more feasible if international trade finds a way to switch to a politically neutral currency. According to some analysts, the U.S.–China standoff could actually fuel the rise of some form of a neutral solution. eToro’s Ross observed:

“The geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S. ensuing from a race towards digital currency dominance could become a fruitful ground for the emergence of a globally independent settlement layer. Given that most businesses favor a stable macroeconomic environment, the incentive to settle transactions in a globally neutral currency would be huge. [...] Whether or not the decentralized digital currency in this scenario would be Bitcoin is impossible to say. Bitcoin’s greatest challenges are still around volatility and adoption.”

James Wo, the chairman and CEO of venture capital company Digital Finance Group, is putting his money on Ether (ETH) rather than Bitcoin, telling Cointelegraph:

"I don’t think Bitcoin can replace USD, because one important functionality of fiat is to serve as a payment tool. In the short term there’s no solid method for Bitcoin to solve its scalability issues, thus it cannot be used as a payment method. The definition of Bitcoin is closer to being a commodity, like gold. I think Ethereum (ETH) has a chance of becoming the worldwide programmable currency."

Kirsch of M10 does not believe that Bitcoin is up to the challenge, as he considers the prospective digital euro as the most likely contender for the throne: “Bitcoin is an accounting system in the cloud. The USD is legal tender. If there is an electronic EUR issued by the ECB [European Central Bank], that could be a challenger to the USD if it were easier to electronically transact 24x7.”

Fleury told Cointelegraph that, in his opinion, Bitcoin has “close to zero chances to reach reserve currency status.” Two main structural reasons for this are its volatility and its algorithmically limited supply. From a monetary policy standpoint, a global reserve currency has to be flexible. Yet another hurdle for Bitcoin is concentration of wealth, which promises to breed “shadow quadrillionaires” in the event it becomes a reserve currency.

Other observers view the chances of decentralized digital currencies to eventually take over the role of a global medium of exchange more optimistically. Miles Paschini, the founder and a director of crypto investment platform B21, emphasized the potential of cryptocurrencies to offer a more useable payment method that will see wide adoption:

“If any system provides easier access to funds, easier movement of funds and better inflationary controls, it is likely there will be a shift in adoption. This is a usability shift that can be realized through great security, user experience and real time payments. As of now all the necessary attributes don’t exist, but they are improving and in the future we certainly see technology providing these aspects.”

It is also possible that the emergence of many alternatives to the dollar will lead to a multipolar arrangement where no single currency enjoys a hegemonic status. Frank Schuil, a crypto advisor and investor, noted: “Most people believe a hybrid form is ultimately what we end up with: state based currencies, decentralized cryptocurrencies and corporate currencies.” Even given this potential diversity, Schuil believes that Bitcoin, as the “people’s money,” has the best shot at taking the winning spot.

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The Coming Of The Police State In America

The Coming Of The Police State In America

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The National Guard and the State Police are now…

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2 hours ago

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March 9, 2024

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The Coming Of The Police State In America

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The National Guard and the State Police are now patrolling the New York City subway system in an attempt to do something about the explosion of crime. As part of this, there are bag checks and new surveillance of all passengers. No legislation, no debate, just an edict from the mayor.

Many citizens who rely on this system for transportation might welcome this. It’s a city of strict gun control, and no one knows for sure if they have the right to defend themselves. Merchants have been harassed and even arrested for trying to stop looting and pillaging in their own shops.

The message has been sent: Only the police can do this job. Whether they do it or not is another matter.

Things on the subway system have gotten crazy. If you know it well, you can manage to travel safely, but visitors to the city who take the wrong train at the wrong time are taking grave risks.

In actual fact, it’s guaranteed that this will only end in confiscating knives and other things that people carry in order to protect themselves while leaving the actual criminals even more free to prey on citizens.

The law-abiding will suffer and the criminals will grow more numerous. It will not end well.

When you step back from the details, what we have is the dawning of a genuine police state in the United States. It only starts in New York City. Where is the Guard going to be deployed next? Anywhere is possible.

If the crime is bad enough, citizens will welcome it. It must have been this way in most times and places that when the police state arrives, the people cheer.

We will all have our own stories of how this came to be. Some might begin with the passage of the Patriot Act and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security in 2001. Some will focus on gun control and the taking away of citizens’ rights to defend themselves.

My own version of events is closer in time. It began four years ago this month with lockdowns. That’s what shattered the capacity of civil society to function in the United States. Everything that has happened since follows like one domino tumbling after another.

It goes like this:

1) lockdown,

2) loss of moral compass and spreading of loneliness and nihilism,

3) rioting resulting from citizen frustration, 4) police absent because of ideological hectoring,

5) a rise in uncontrolled immigration/refugees,

6) an epidemic of ill health from substance abuse and otherwise,

7) businesses flee the city

8) cities fall into decay, and that results in

9) more surveillance and police state.

The 10th stage is the sacking of liberty and civilization itself.

It doesn’t fall out this way at every point in history, but this seems like a solid outline of what happened in this case. Four years is a very short period of time to see all of this unfold. But it is a fact that New York City was more-or-less civilized only four years ago. No one could have predicted that it would come to this so quickly.

But once the lockdowns happened, all bets were off. Here we had a policy that most directly trampled on all freedoms that we had taken for granted. Schools, businesses, and churches were slammed shut, with various levels of enforcement. The entire workforce was divided between essential and nonessential, and there was widespread confusion about who precisely was in charge of designating and enforcing this.

It felt like martial law at the time, as if all normal civilian law had been displaced by something else. That something had to do with public health, but there was clearly more going on, because suddenly our social media posts were censored and we were being asked to do things that made no sense, such as mask up for a virus that evaded mask protection and walk in only one direction in grocery aisles.

Vast amounts of the white-collar workforce stayed home—and their kids, too—until it became too much to bear. The city became a ghost town. Most U.S. cities were the same.

As the months of disaster rolled on, the captives were let out of their houses for the summer in order to protest racism but no other reason. As a way of excusing this, the same public health authorities said that racism was a virus as bad as COVID-19, so therefore it was permitted.

The protests had turned to riots in many cities, and the police were being defunded and discouraged to do anything about the problem. Citizens watched in horror as downtowns burned and drug-crazed freaks took over whole sections of cities. It was like every standard of decency had been zapped out of an entire swath of the population.

Meanwhile, large checks were arriving in people’s bank accounts, defying every normal economic expectation. How could people not be working and get their bank accounts more flush with cash than ever? There was a new law that didn’t even require that people pay rent. How weird was that? Even student loans didn’t need to be paid.

By the fall, recess from lockdown was over and everyone was told to go home again. But this time they had a job to do: They were supposed to vote. Not at the polling places, because going there would only spread germs, or so the media said. When the voting results finally came in, it was the absentee ballots that swung the election in favor of the opposition party that actually wanted more lockdowns and eventually pushed vaccine mandates on the whole population.

The new party in control took note of the large population movements out of cities and states that they controlled. This would have a large effect on voting patterns in the future. But they had a plan. They would open the borders to millions of people in the guise of caring for refugees. These new warm bodies would become voters in time and certainly count on the census when it came time to reapportion political power.

Meanwhile, the native population had begun to swim in ill health from substance abuse, widespread depression, and demoralization, plus vaccine injury. This increased dependency on the very institutions that had caused the problem in the first place: the medical/scientific establishment.

The rise of crime drove the small businesses out of the city. They had barely survived the lockdowns, but they certainly could not survive the crime epidemic. This undermined the tax base of the city and allowed the criminals to take further control.

The same cities became sanctuaries for the waves of migrants sacking the country, and partisan mayors actually used tax dollars to house these invaders in high-end hotels in the name of having compassion for the stranger. Citizens were pushed out to make way for rampaging migrant hordes, as incredible as this seems.

But with that, of course, crime rose ever further, inciting citizen anger and providing a pretext to bring in the police state in the form of the National Guard, now tasked with cracking down on crime in the transportation system.

What’s the next step? It’s probably already here: mass surveillance and censorship, plus ever-expanding police power. This will be accompanied by further population movements, as those with the means to do so flee the city and even the country and leave it for everyone else to suffer.

As I tell the story, all of this seems inevitable. It is not. It could have been stopped at any point. A wise and prudent political leadership could have admitted the error from the beginning and called on the country to rediscover freedom, decency, and the difference between right and wrong. But ego and pride stopped that from happening, and we are left with the consequences.

The government grows ever bigger and civil society ever less capable of managing itself in large urban centers. Disaster is unfolding in real time, mitigated only by a rising stock market and a financial system that has yet to fall apart completely.

Are we at the middle stages of total collapse, or at the point where the population and people in leadership positions wise up and decide to put an end to the downward slide? It’s hard to know. But this much we do know: There is a growing pocket of resistance out there that is fed up and refuses to sit by and watch this great country be sacked and taken over by everything it was set up to prevent.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 16:20

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate…

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6 hours ago

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March 9, 2024

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate iron levels in their blood due to a COVID-19 infection could be at greater risk of long COVID.

(Shutterstock)

A new study indicates that problems with iron levels in the bloodstream likely trigger chronic inflammation and other conditions associated with the post-COVID phenomenon. The findings, published on March 1 in Nature Immunology, could offer new ways to treat or prevent the condition.

Long COVID Patients Have Low Iron Levels

Researchers at the University of Cambridge pinpointed low iron as a potential link to long-COVID symptoms thanks to a study they initiated shortly after the start of the pandemic. They recruited people who tested positive for the virus to provide blood samples for analysis over a year, which allowed the researchers to look for post-infection changes in the blood. The researchers looked at 214 samples and found that 45 percent of patients reported symptoms of long COVID that lasted between three and 10 months.

In analyzing the blood samples, the research team noticed that people experiencing long COVID had low iron levels, contributing to anemia and low red blood cell production, just two weeks after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. This was true for patients regardless of age, sex, or the initial severity of their infection.

According to one of the study co-authors, the removal of iron from the bloodstream is a natural process and defense mechanism of the body.

But it can jeopardize a person’s recovery.

“When the body has an infection, it responds by removing iron from the bloodstream. This protects us from potentially lethal bacteria that capture the iron in the bloodstream and grow rapidly. It’s an evolutionary response that redistributes iron in the body, and the blood plasma becomes an iron desert,” University of Oxford professor Hal Drakesmith said in a press release. “However, if this goes on for a long time, there is less iron for red blood cells, so oxygen is transported less efficiently affecting metabolism and energy production, and for white blood cells, which need iron to work properly. The protective mechanism ends up becoming a problem.”

The research team believes that consistently low iron levels could explain why individuals with long COVID continue to experience fatigue and difficulty exercising. As such, the researchers suggested iron supplementation to help regulate and prevent the often debilitating symptoms associated with long COVID.

“It isn’t necessarily the case that individuals don’t have enough iron in their body, it’s just that it’s trapped in the wrong place,” Aimee Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said in the press release. “What we need is a way to remobilize the iron and pull it back into the bloodstream, where it becomes more useful to the red blood cells.”

The research team pointed out that iron supplementation isn’t always straightforward. Achieving the right level of iron varies from person to person. Too much iron can cause stomach issues, ranging from constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain to gastritis and gastric lesions.

1 in 5 Still Affected by Long COVID

COVID-19 has affected nearly 40 percent of Americans, with one in five of those still suffering from symptoms of long COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Long COVID is marked by health issues that continue at least four weeks after an individual was initially diagnosed with COVID-19. Symptoms can last for days, weeks, months, or years and may include fatigue, cough or chest pain, headache, brain fog, depression or anxiety, digestive issues, and joint or muscle pain.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 12:50

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February Employment Situation

By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000…

Published

7 hours ago

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March 9, 2024

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By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert

The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000 average over the previous 12 months. The payroll data for January and December were revised down by a total of 167,000. The private sector added 223,000 new jobs, the largest gain since May of last year.

Temporary help services employment continues a steep decline after a sharp post-pandemic rise.

Average hours of work increased from 34.2 to 34.3. The increase, along with the 223,000 private employment increase led to a hefty increase in total hours of 5.6% at an annualized rate, also the largest increase since May of last year.

The establishment report, once again, beat “expectations;” the WSJ survey of economists was 198,000. Other than the downward revisions, mentioned above, another bit of negative news was a smallish increase in wage growth, from $34.52 to $34.57.

The household survey shows that the labor force increased 150,000, a drop in employment of 184,000 and an increase in the number of unemployed persons of 334,000. The labor force participation rate held steady at 62.5, the employment to population ratio decreased from 60.2 to 60.1 and the unemployment rate increased from 3.66 to 3.86. Remember that the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed relative to the labor force (the number employed plus the number unemployed). Consequently, the unemployment rate can go up if the number of unemployed rises holding fixed the labor force, or if the labor force shrinks holding the number unemployed unchanged. An increase in the unemployment rate is not necessarily a bad thing: it may reflect a strong labor market drawing “marginally attached” individuals from outside the labor force. Indeed, there was a 96,000 decline in those workers.

Earlier in the week, the BLS announced JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data for January. There isn’t much to report here as the job openings changed little at 8.9 million, the number of hires and total separations were little changed at 5.7 million and 5.3 million, respectively.

As has been the case for the last couple of years, the number of job openings remains higher than the number of unemployed persons.

Also earlier in the week the BLS announced that productivity increased 3.2% in the 4th quarter with output rising 3.5% and hours of work rising 0.3%.

The bottom line is that the labor market continues its surprisingly (to some) strong performance, once again proving stronger than many had expected. This strength makes it difficult to justify any interest rate cuts soon, particularly given the recent inflation spike.

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