If the Federal Reserve begins pulling its irons out of the stimulus fire in September, the resulting rocketing of the dollar and accompanying deflation will lead the Fed to reverse course by early 2014.
So says Jim Rickards, managing director of Tangent Capital and author of the 2011 bestseller, "Currency Wars."
Rickards, who said September tapering could spur the dollar to jump 20 percent versus the yen, added, "The bigger picture is the Fed has no good alternative."
The central dilemma: The Fed is feeling heat to ratchet down its $85 billion-a-month bond-buying program, which pressures the dollar because it is tantamount to printing money. Hawks are worried about asset bubbles and systemic risks. Growing speculation that the Fed would taper in September sent the dollar index to three-year highs early this week.
Ref http://www.cnbc.com/id/100874576
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A prelude to the book 'Currency Wars":
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A prelude to the book 'Currency Wars":
n August 15, 1971, a quiet Sunday evening, President Richard Nixon took to the airwaves, preempting the most popular television show in America, to announce his New Economic Policy. The government was imposing national price controls and a steep surtax on foreign imports and banning the conversion of dollars into gold. The country was in the midst of a crisis, the result of an ongoing currency war that had destroyed faith in the U.S. dollar, and the president had determined that extreme measures were necessary.
Today we are engaged in a new currency war, and another crisis of confidence in the dollar is on its way. This time the consequences will be far worse than those confronting Nixon. The growth in globalization, derivatives and leverage over the past forty years have made financial panic and contagion all but impossible to contain.
The new crisis will likely begin in the currency markets and spread quickly to stocks, bonds and commodities. When the dollar collapses, the dollar-denominated markets will collapse too. Panic will quickly spread throughout the world.
As a result, another U.S. president, possibly President Obama, will take to the airwaves and cyberspace to announce a radical plan of intervention to save the dollar from complete collapse, invoking legal authority already in place today. This new plan may even involve a return to the gold standard. If gold is used, it will be at a dramatically higher price in order to support the bloated money supply with the fixed quantity of gold available. Americans who had invested in gold earlier will be confronted with a 90% “windfall profits” tax on their newfound wealth, imposed in the name of fairness. European and Japanese gold presently stored in New York will be confiscated and converted to use in the service of the New Dollar Policy. No doubt the Europeans and Japanese will be given receipts for their former gold, convertible into New Dollars at a new, higher price.
While Fed money printing on a trillion-dollar scale may be new, currency wars are not. Currency wars have been fought before — twice in the twentieth century alone — and they always end badly. At best, currency wars offer the sorry spectacle of countries stealing growth from trading partners. At worst, they degenerate into sequential bouts of inflation, recession, retaliation and actual violence as the scramble for resources leads to invasion and war. The historical precedents are sobering enough, but the dangers today are even greater, exponentially increased by the scale and complexity of financial linkages throughout the -world.
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The above are excerpts from the book.
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