It’s hard to get away from the steady drumbeat of comments calling for diversification away from the dollar. On Tuesday, they’ll be plenty of opportunity for more as Brazil, Russia, India and China - the so-called BRIC nations - meet in Yekaterinburg, Russia for their first official summit. A top Kremlin official, however, said discussing a new reserve currency will not be on the agenda. Russia and China policy makers in particular have called for an alternative to the greenback, not surprising given their sizable holdings of dollar-denominated assets.
But like all things, setting up an alternative to the dollar will take time, and there’s no use talking down the U.S. dollar-denominated holdings before there’s something else to leap into.
Data released Monday from the U.S. Treasury showed just how dependent nations like China and Russia are on the fortunes of the dollar and U.S. debt.
China, as of April, still held $763.5 billion in U.S. Treasurys - making it far and away the biggest holder of government bond securities. While it’s down a smidgen - what’s $4.4 billion among friends - from the month before, it’s still up $20 billion from February. Russia, though further down the rankings, has $137 billion tucked away - again slightly down from the prior month but still up from February.
The short-term problem for all nations who invested their piles of currency reserves into safe havens like U.S. Treasurys and agency debt is how to pare back those investments as they seek to become less dependent on the ups and downs of the U.S. economy. Even if there were an alternative, big sales by major holders of U.S. government bonds would send the market into a tailspin - an unfortunate and likely a catastrophic development when the world is trying to emerge from worst global slump since the Depression.
But then, there’s still not much of an alternative. Even if nations wanted to diversify into other existing currencies rather than a brand new one, there are still no markets as deep and liquid as the U.S. debt markets. For better or worse, we’re in this together for a while.
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4 comments so far
What a crock. There are hundreds of other currencies out there.
- Posted by thomasIt does not make sense for Russia and China to finance the military expenditures of the United States, as the military adventures of the U.S. are contrary to their own interests. As the U.S. consumer contracts even more, the need to hold treasuries to maintain exports disappears. The BRIC nations already know that the U.S. will try to do a “soft” default by quantitative easing; the BRIC nations are looking for a plan of action going forward. There are many alternatives to the current Bretton Woods II system.
- Posted by mikeThis article is clearly written from the perspective of someone who thinks the future is always 90 days away.
Of course for the time being there is no alternative to the dollar as reserve currency! But countries which are accustomed to thinking longer-term than the next business quarter understand that forming a replacement is going to take time, years even. The fact that these nations are now meeting (without US juvenile interference) should indicate that they feel the time to act has arrived.
Acting doesn’t mean wildly thrashing about, such as indicated by Obama’s throwing money at Wall Street and hoping to patch the leaks in the banks while throwing Main Street’s GM jobs overboard. It means carefully examining both the problem and the options for solving that problem so as to avoid making the existing problems worse. Instantly-gratified Americans don’t understand this process anymore, which explains why our commenter sees the forest only as more trees to be profitably cut down.
- Posted by RealistNew Currency Reserve possible.
PeopleSearches.com
- Posted by wones