Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Rick Warren's Pal's at Council on Foreign Relations Call for End To National Currencies:

Rick Warren claims to be a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, A Washington Think Tank made up of International Intellectuals, Ex-Presidents, Ex-Government Officials, and Ex-Military Leaders. The CFR's main goal is the removal of all National Borders to end what they call Nationalism induced war and suffering.

Quote from the article:

"But the world can do better. Since economic development outside the process of globalization is no longer possible, countries should abandon monetary nationalism. Governments should replace national currencies with the dollar or the euro or, in the case of Asia, collaborate to produce a new multinational currency over a comparably large and economically diversified area.

Europeans used to say that being a country required having a national airline, a stock exchange, and a currency. Today, no European country is any worse off without them. Even grumpy Italy has benefited enormously from the lower interest rates and permanent end to lira speculation that accompanied its adoption of the euro. A future pan-Asian currency, managed according to the same principle of targeting low and stable inflation, would represent the most promising way for China to fully liberalize its financial and capital markets without fear of damaging renminbi speculation (the Chinese economy is only the size of California's and Florida's combined). Most of the world's smaller and poorer countries would clearly be best off unilaterally adopting the dollar or the euro, which would enable their safe and rapid integration into global financial markets. Latin American countries should dollarize; eastern European countries and Turkey, euroize. Broadly speaking, this prescription follows from relative trade flows, but there are exceptions; Argentina, for example, does more eurozone than U.S. trade, but Argentines think and save in dollars.

Of course, dollarizing countries must give up independent monetary policy as a tool of government macroeconomic management. But since the Holy Grail of monetary policy is to get interest rates down to the lowest level consistent with low and stable inflation, an argument against dollarization on this ground is, for most of the world, frivolous. How many Latin American countries can cut interest rates below those in the United States? The average inflation-adjusted lending rate in Latin America is about 20 percent. One must therefore ask what possible boon to the national economy developing-country central banks can hope to achieve from the ability to guide nominal local rates up and down on a discretionary basis. It is like choosing a Hyundai with manual transmission over a Lexus with automatic: the former gives the driver more control but at the cost of inferior performance under any condition. . . . . . . . ."

The End of National Currency is the most astonishing thing that I have read since Zbigniew Brzezinski’s appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this year.

Foreign Affairs is the most important and influential journal of International Relations in the world. It is the mechanism by which the Council on Foreign Relations disseminates the game plan to people in polite circles. CFR’s positions on core issues represent the raw building blocks for most of the gibberish spewed by corporate television, radio & newspaper media.


Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are dumbed down versions of Foreign Affairs that are published daily. Television news is the same thing, but dumbed down again. Foreign Affairs is also where politicians from several countries look to determine what’s safe to say, which policies are doable and what needs to be done. A degree in International Relations is largely a certification of a student’s ability to internalize CFR jargon and concepts.

Got the picture?

Now, what did the most important and influential journal of International Relations in the world just say about the U.S. Dollar and the global economy?

In summary: The U.S. dollar is an “absurdity” and the only way to stave off a global disaster is for most countries to join one of three global currencies, based loosely on: the dollar, the euro and a pan Asian currency.

I encourage everyone to read The End of National Currency in its entirety, but I’ll quote some more from this article below:

The dollar’s privileged status as today’s global money is not heaven-bestowed. The dollar is ultimately just another money supported only by faith that others will willingly accept it in the future in return for the same sort of valuable things it bought in the past. This puts a great burden on the institutions of the U.S. government to validate that faith. And those institutions, unfortunately, are failing to shoulder that burden. Reckless U.S. fiscal policy is undermining the dollar’s position even as the currency’s role as a global money is expanding.

Four decades ago, the renowned French economist Jacques Rueff, writing just a few years before the collapse of the Bretton Woods dollar-based gold-exchange standard, argued that the system “attains such a degree of absurdity that no human brain having the power to reason can defend it.” The precariousness of the dollar’s position today is similar. The United States can run a chronic balance-of-payments deficit and never feel the effects. Dollars sent abroad immediately come home in the form of loans, as dollars are of no use abroad. “If I had an agreement with my tailor that whatever money I pay him he returns to me the very same day as a loan,” Rueff explained by way of analogy, “I would have no objection at all to ordering more suits from him.”

With the U.S. current account deficit running at an enormous 6.6 percent of GDP (about $2 billion a day must be imported to sustain it), the United States is in the fortunate position of the suit buyer with a Chinese tailor who instantaneously returns his payments in the form of loans — generally, in the U.S. case, as purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds. The current account deficit is partially fueled by the budget deficit (a dollar more of the latter yields about 20-50 cents more of the former), which will soar in the next decade in the absence of reforms to curtail federal “entitlement” spending on medical care and retirement benefits for a longer-living population. The United States — and, indeed, its Chinese tailor — must therefore be concerned with the sustainability of what Rueff called an “absurdity.” In the absence of long-term fiscal prudence, the United States risks undermining the faith foreigners have placed in its management of the dollar — that is, their belief that the U.S. government can continue to sustain low inflation without having to resort to growth-crushing interest-rate hikes as a means of ensuring continued high capital inflows

At the turn of the twentieth century — the height of the gold standard — Simmel commented, “Although money with no intrinsic value would be the best means of exchange in an ideal social order, until that point is reached the most satisfactory form of money may be that which is bound to a material substance.” Today, with money no longer bound to any material substance, it is worth asking whether the world even approximates the “ideal social order” that could sustain a fiat dollar as the foundation of the global financial system. There is no way effectively to insure against the unwinding of global imbalances should China, with over a trillion dollars of reserves, and other countries with dollar-rich central banks come to fear the unbearable lightness of their holdings.




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