Dollar decline accelerates

When Paula Comings, the head of currency sales for US Bancorp, talks to US importers, she increasingly hears the same message: Their foreign counterparties no longer want to be paid in dollars.

Some even prefer the renminbi :slight_smile:

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Currencies, including the dollar, alway vary against each other. The point is not the dollar going down (although that doesn’t help), but the extreme increase in uncertainty under current, ahem, USA “policy practices”.

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Yeah, maybe. Then again, maybe not.

I realize this is a plot only against the Euro, but I think it indicative of what can come - and go - over a few years, depending on a lot of different things going on in the world. Which there are a bunch going on now. (I don’t like them, needless to say, but nobody asked me.)

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Just a note for those who didn’t notice the red squiggly line in the chart in the previous post. That’s the Renminbi down there. Wayyy down there. No, keep going, waaaaaaay down there.

Not a lot of folks demanding they settle their international accounts in it, apparently.

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But it went from 3% to 5%. That’s a 67% growth rate. :slightly_smiling_face:

DB2

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I don’t think there is any way a heavily exporting country can ever become a world reserve currency.

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We did, post World War II. We became the world currency and led the world in exports, largely because we were the only one with a production base intact, in fact it was cranking like crazy, and we began shipping everything from food to steel all over the planet,.

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Sure you can. Great Britain was a net exporter from about 1700 to the early 20th century, due to exports of textiles and other manufactured goods, as well as services like insurance. If you wanted to do business with GB, you needed pounds. And their banks dominated the capital markets. So the pound it was.

China restricts access to its capital markets, so the renminbi cannot be a reserve currency. There isn’t enough liquidity.

The reason they restrict access because they are an exporting nation. If they allowed free access to their markets, the renminbi with become stronger, making exports more expensive. So they don’t. Someday they may change their minds, but that’s not the plan for now.

Occasionally we hear talk about a BRICS currency and the like. And talk is all it is. China needs and wants its currency pegged to the dollar. Technically, it is pegged to a basket of currencies, but in a practical sense it is a dollar peg. Since China controls its own currency they would have to stark raving mad to advance a BRICS currency that they don’t control.

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