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The USDX has been rising steadily since last summer…but why? Can it be sustained? Is the dollar due for a fall, and if so, what is going to take its place. Join James and Alfred for their weekly conversation on finance and politics as they discuss the dollar, the Fed, the Eurozone, the yuan, the SDR, and the fate of the global economy.

SHOW NOTES

Dollar Index Spot

“Taper Tantrum” Talk Starts In Europe Two Days Into QE

US dollar rally ‘has years to go’

China’s SWIFT Alternative and the (Engineered) Death of the Dollar

Yuan Has Real Shot at IMF Blessing on Reserve Status

The Chinese have put out billboard ads announcing the renminbi as the new world currency

Triffin dilemma

China suggests an end to the dollar era

A year after fleeing Ukraine, Yanukovich speaks of return

Putin Recounts How He Gave Orders to ‘Save’ Yanukovych, ‘Return’ Crimea

TRANSCRIPT
ALFRED ADASK: Hi folks I’m Alfred Adask, here’s Financial Survival, our guest is James Corbett from the Corbett Report. James has been living in Japan for I believe 10 years now and he generates some really interesting, intelligent, intellectual comments on the Corbett Report. He comes and he shows up on most Thursdays on Financial Survival. James how are you doing?

JAMES CORBETT: I am doing very well great to be back with you Alfred.

ALFRED ADASK: Good to have you here. You know I’m looking at the US Dollar Index, I’ve got a graph of it in front of me and I know you don’t see this right now but, you may already be familiar with this. The US Dollar Index moved along at pretty much a steady 80 on the scale March, April, May, June, into July. But then somewhere in July last year it began to accelerate, and it has gone from 80 on the US Dollar Index to almost 100 today. That’s a 25% increase in the apparent value of the dollar in seven or eight months.

And more to the point, or at least it’s interesting, I’m looking at the graph and I can see that the Dollar Index, as measured on this graph on a one-year scale, I can see that since July the US Dollar Index has moved upward at an average angle of, say, 45 degrees, steady,there’s some ups and downs, but 45 degrees on this particular graph, until the last ten days or so, where according to this graph, it’s gone almost vertical.

It’s about 80 degrees , relative to this study of 45, it’s now moving up vertically, almost vertically at 80 degrees and I’m wondering: How high can the US Dollar Index go?.

Do you think it’s going to go up, hit a peak, and then fall like a sky-rocket – they shoot up and then they fall down or is it going to go up and slowly come down?

What do you think is happening to the US Dollar Index because to me it appears that this may be a primary indicator of what’s going on in the US economy and global economies and perhaps global economies?

JAMES CORBETT: I think you’re right. I think this is very much tied into the entire overall international economic and financial structure so, obviously as the world reserve currency, as goes the dollar so goes the world in a lot of different ways, and so there’s a lot of things that play into this.

And one of the things that I think is interesting to note with that graph of the USDX that you’re talking about is, you will notice that of course it starts to spike in July, and what else started to happen in July? Of course the big oil crash that we saw over the past several months and obviously there is some sort of causal relationship there. I think it’s in the fact that since the oil is priced in dollars, as the dollar rate grows in strength it’s able to purchase more oil so oil falls in price per barrel.

So I think that’s one of they types of factors that play into this, although there’s a lot of other things going on here, and I think something else that may be accounting for what we’re seeing, especially in the recent data as you say, the USDX just spiking all of a sudden, I think this might be related to some of the things that we see going on in the Eurozone right now because again, the value of a currency is measured in relation to other currencies generally speaking.

So why is the US dollar going up? Well one of the factors that plays into that is that the Euro is not doing well and why is the Euro not doing well? Well it turns out that just a few days into the actual implementation of that Druggie bazooka that we heard so much about a month or so ago, where the European Union is starting its own round of quantitative easing, within a few days of that starting there have already been major questions about whether or not all of the participants in the eurozone are even going to be able to fulfill the requirement of purchasing enough assets to make up their part of the bargain, Germany and others, there’s serious questions about whether they will even be able to do this type of quantitative easing, so the Euro continues.

I know we’ve talked about this for years now, but it continues to be in a type of Europocalypse situation where it’s consistently teetering on the edge of just ruination, and I think that has to play a certain part into what’s going on with the US dollar, and if you look at the other side of the big pond, if you look over at the west coast and you look at Japan and the Japanese yen, obviously the Japanese yen continuing to depreciate as part of the Abenomics policy that’s been going on here for the last couple of years which again I think contributes to the strengthening of the dollar, so there’s a lot of different factors that play into this internationally, but what it ultimately means is yes that the US dollar is spiking and how long will it last? I mean obviously that’s the big question. If I knew that for certainty I guess I could make lots of these phony bills but it depends who you ask, and a lot of the big money institutional investors are saying, at least publicly, that it’s going to last at least throughout this year and they’ve been saying that pretty consistently since the middle part of last year.

Just as one example you had Chris Turner who’s the head of strategy at ING, saying just back in last October, that the dollar rally has another two years to go at least, so that would bring us towards the end of 2016. But that’s kind of a fool’s game to try to predict that type of thing because it depends on so many different factors like for example the ability of the EU to follow through with its quantitative easing or the situation in Ukraine potentially leading to some sort of conflict there. Again there’s a million different things that could happen that could completely upset the apple cart between now and then. But all things being equal it looks like the dollar rally is set to continue throughout this year.

ALFRED ADASK: Now that’s hard for me to understand and hard for me to believe because I understand this dollar rally to be evidence of deflation. The purchasing power of the dollar is growing, that is essentially evidence of deflation so far as I’m able to see. Deflation typically corresponds to economic recession or depression. It means that the value of existing debt is growing. People are having to pay off their debts with more expensive dollars due to deflation rather than cheaper dollars which is what we’d expect in an era of inflation. How does the government survive this? I mean they’ve got that enormous…they admit to 18 trillion dollars, and there’s other entities that say 18 trillion dollar national debt. John Williams says no it’s close to 100 trillion.

A guy named Laurence Kotlikoff just spoke in Congress and said “I know you guys are broke” and the real, the total debt in this country, he used the term ‘fiscal gap’, but he’s coming up with over 200 trillion dollars that is owed or promised, much of that is unfunded liabilities. All of this is growing. I look at this and I see that the dollar has increased in purchasing power, in theory, by about 25 percent over the last 7-8 months. Can this be sustained without it going into a depression?

JAMES CORBETT: I would say not, and there are a lot of things to talk about with regards to that, but on the issue of the debt specifically the question – the real question is At what point would the debt become unpayable?, in the sense that, not that the US government will not be able to generate the revenue to actually even cover the interest or what have you.

It’s not a question of generating revenue as we know with the quantitative easing, they can print up as many zeros as they need to or want to at any time and as long as people continue to do so, and the way the current international structure is fixed they’re free to continue printing those zeros ’til the cows come home. So it doesn’t actually matter in that system whether it’s 18 trillion of debt or 18 tetradragillion of debt. It’s ultimately the same thing as long as people continue to use the US dollar and continue to trust the US government, they can add as many zeros to that as they want.

So in a way that’s almost a red herring. But the real question, as you say, is Does this lead us into a deflationary depression cycle?, where, in in the actual economy, people are absolutely unable to generate work because obviously things dry up as the economy starts to plunge into that deflation cycle, exactly as we saw in the 1930s.

So I think that’s the real question and in some ways this is what theoretically the quantitative easing was all about, is that in order to head off the deflationary cycle like what we saw in the 1930s well you’ve just got to print money till the cows come home, which they tried to do, and now that they’ve eased off that gas pedal we see the deflationary cycle starting.

So the logic of the situation, if there is any logic to this, is well I guess the Fed will just have to start doing QE again. But in a weird way they’re at least committing, openly at this point, to going in the exact opposite direction – they’re going to start raising rates this year. They’ve not only eased off the gas pedal they’re actually going to put on the brakes a little bit, and again, it doesn’t make any sense from any perspective, other than to say the markets no longer correspond to anything regarding actual economic reality – they are 100 percent dictated by the fiat decree of the central bankers, and whatever they want ultimately starts to become reality. Again because people believe in it and people continue to trade US dollars.

As long as the Fed has their hand on that lever they can do what they want with it in that sense, so… this is obviously not sustainable. The only question is what other bubble can they possibly blow at this point to get out from under this deflationary cycle that we seem to be in? And again the sky seems to be the limit with that, and not only student debt but now sub-prime loans are making a comeback. There’s even sub-prime car loans which are taking up a greater and greater share of the debt-burden these days. So there’s a lot of different bubbles they can try to blow and it’s just a question of what’s going to be the next one to blow up.

ALFRED ADASK: Well I look at this evidence of deflation that we see in the US Dollar Index and I can’t imagine what their intent is because I know it’s contrary, I mean the government has inflated, inflated, inflated for most of my lifetime. They have worked at inflation in order, in part, to default on some of the national debt, in my opinion. It’s one of the ways to write off part of the debt – just inflate, inflate, inflate. Here we are suddenly in deflation. I can’t imagine what their intention is, unless they want to cause a depression. Other than that I can’t see this, which raises the next question for me Is this evidence of some peculiar plan?, where the government and the central banks have decided that we’re going to have deflation in the US dollar -“We’ve got this scheme, we’ve got this reason, and we wont tell anybody”. But is this part of a conspiracy theory in a sense, or is it evidence that QE1, QE2 and QE3 never really generated the amount of inflation they were hoping for? Have they lost control? Is this happening because the forces of deflation have simply overwhelmed whatever inflationary manipulation the government hoped to achieve? Have they lost control?

JAMES CORBETT: Yes. Well an extremely important question and I think you’re getting to sort of the bedrock of what’s going on here because I think, as with so many other things, I think there are different factions at different levels of the ‘information pyramid’ that have different perspectives on what’s going on, so I think when you are looking at people who are in the Treasury Department, who are in the Fed and working in that system, they probably do, I think, believe the narrative that we’re expected to believe – that the Fed has been trying to fight the deflationary undertow with the inflation of QE, and that’s what this has all been about.

But you pose a very interesting question, given that we are at this point standing on the brink of a deflationary cycle that does seem to be, in so many different ways, that could lead to disaster for the American economy. It does beg the question Is this the inevitable consequence of what has happened and if so, does this mean there are people who have foreseen this and are actually trying to bring it about?

And I think that this is an exceptionally important question to at least be asking, and my response would be that this, I don’t know about this particular instantiation but I know that at some point, in order to achieve the type of international financial structure that the globalists want to achieve, there has to be that type of collapse in the US dollar system.

So I believe there is an agenda to collapse the system, as we know it, in order to bring about the next iteration of it, and on that note there has been an exceptionally important story that I just wrote about in The Forecaster just yesterday, that I hope people will take a look at it’s at theinternationalforecaster.com, and posted up on corbettreport.com, talking about China’s latest move to become an international player on the currency stage with their SWIFT alternative, and for people who don’t know the Swift network is a private group in Belgium, it’s a member-owned organization of banks and financial institutions around the world, over 10,000 financial institutions in over 200 countries and territories, because I don’t think there even are 200 countries, and this is a network that basically banks use to communicate with each other.

They send Payment Orders through this network and there’s no actual clearing or settling of accounts through this network but the information is transmitted through it, but as we saw in 2012 when the Iranian sanctions were kicking in, the EU and US forced Swift to delist 30 Iranian banks including the central bank from the SWIFT network so they were basically cut off from the international financial architecture, as a way of implementing those sanctions.

Now in recent months it’s been repeatedly floated that, well if push comes to shove in the Ukraine, we can de-list Russia as a way to get back at them. So Russia has been working on its own internal payment system that would allow banks within Russia to communicate with each other without the need for this SWIFT network, and China has been working on an international system that will send that type of information, specifically Yuan-denominated transactions through the International financial institutions.

So that that’s another huge step towards the internationalization of the Yuan, the renmimbi, the Chinese national currency which is, as we’ve talked about before in The death of a thousand paper cuts, another indication that China is seriously attempting to make the Yuan an international currency. Not necessarily that it’s going to be world reserve currency, as I’ve said before, the Chinese governor of the People’s Bank of China – the Chinese central bank, has specifically argued that he want the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights to become that international currency, but China is definitely angling to get the Yuan included in that Special Drawing Rights basket.

That is an exceptionally big story. Apparently this new Chinese SWIFT network alternative system is going to be up and running by the end of the year, and if and when that happens I think that’s going to be seen by future historians as, I think, the world historical event in terms of a pretty big sign post along the way of this death of the dollar, and again there’s so much to talk about but I think this is part of an engineered death of the dollar that we’re seeing right now.

ALFRED ADASK: So you believe they’re still in control, we’re not looking at evidence of a loss of control?This is happening by intent the dollar’s going up on the US Dollar Index intentionally. Somebody’s intent whatever their reason is it’s not a loss of control?

JAMES CORBETT: More or less but if the control is about crashing the system that’s easy to do. So there’s a different way of looking at that.

[BREAK] 17:05

ALFRED ADASK: Hi folks I’m Alfred Adask here on Financial Survival, our guest is James Corbett from The Corbett Report, you can find him on the internet, and we’ve been talking about the dollar on the US Dollar Index, evidence of deflation of the dollar. We’ve been talking about how this can contribute to some very serious problems in this country perhaps even some sort of an economic collapse, and as we closed the last section of the program James began to touch on the idea of the currency wars that are going on between the United States with the SWIFT system and Russia and China and what this brings to mind. I have an article here it was written by Simon Black at the Sovereign Man publication, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that?

JAMES CORBETT: I certainly am I’m subscribed to his podcast as well – quite informative.

ALFRED ADASK: Okay did you see the recent photograph he had, I think it was last week, of a billboard in Bangkok? He said he came out of the airport and was astonished to see what he described as a huge billboard, and it was put up by the People’s Bank of China which means it’s put up by the government of China which owns 70 percent of the People’s Bank of China, and the billboard says on it: ‘RNB’ meaning renminbi, their currency; ‘New Choice’; and below that ‘The world currency”, and there’s a graphic on this billboard where a woman’s hand is holding a coin.

Now unfortunately he took a photograph of this while he was in a moving automobile so it’s a little bit blurred you can’t make out all the details. But first and foremost, the bank of China is advertising that the renmimbi become a new choice for the world reserve currency. All by itself it strikes me as a bold challenge to the US dollar.

The next point is the graphic, I can’t make out what coin they have but I’ve fooled around with it by expanding and magnifying it, increasing detail, I don’t have the resources to change this enough where I can identify the coin. China has some coins that are made out of brass or at least an inexpensive alloy that looks like, there’s a little bit of color to it but it’s brass it’s not gold. But in this graphic the coin appears to be gold.

Now it’s got a gold color but I can’t make out what kind of coin it is. Is it a panda or is it a jiao if I’m saying it correctly? Their jiao is one of their coins that are made out of something like brass. Is it possible that China is signaling that they intend to back the renmimbi with gold, and take on the role of world reserve currency? Does that make any sense to you at all or is it a little too far out?

JAMES CORBETT: Yes it does it does make sense. I see where you’re going with that and you’re right there’s definitely a gold coin of some sort in that picture. I don’t know ,as you say it’s difficult to tell because the picture is rather low resolution. Now it’s obviously a couple of steps of speculation from there to saying that they’re talking about a gold-backed renmimbi. I still continue to believe that they are not heading towards gold-backing of the RNB because I think that China is in a position where it has been fueled, for the last several years the Chinese economy has been fueled, by credit creation and obviously if you gold-back the money you can’t do that in the same way so I don’t think that’s where they’re heading.

Another interpretation of that billboard that I read about with someone saying “Well they’re trying to imply that it’s as good as gold”, rather than showing a paper bill or something.

ALFRED ADASK: There’s a bunch of things but it’s still a very bold challenge to the US dollar.

JAMES CORBETT: It certainly is…

ALFRED ADASK: It’s almost inconceivable that they accidentally put a coin up there that looks like it’s gold. Now wait a second, from a political perspective this is a very, you know, someone has lost control here or someone has fired a shot across the dollar’s bow.

JAMES CORBETT: Yes I think so, I mean it has to be seen that way and I wish I could tell, in the upper left corner of that billboard there is some Chinese writing and I can certainly make out China, the Chinese characters for China. I can’t tell what is after that. It is not the People’s Bank of China but I can’t tell what government agency is putting that out but it certainly does look like a Chinese government agency is now promoting billboards internationally, advertising the Yuan.

I mean that is a pretty bold step and I think a pretty obvious sign of where things are heading and we’ve talked about this many times but I think it is important to continue highlighting it because when and if the US dollar is eclipsed as the world reserve currency that will be, probably the single most important event of our lifetimes, probably the single most important geopolitical event since the Second World War in terms of the type of tectonic shifts on the international stage that will bring about. And there’s so many different implications to that but I think one that obviously applies to Americans who are listening to this conversation, the fact that, of course the US dollar is the world reserve currency as we talked about before, the debt of the US government doesn’t really matter, they can continue to print as many zeros as they want as long as people are continuing the scramble for dollars.

When the world reserve currency status is lost, suddenly that makes a difference. Suddenly the huge current account deficit that the US has been running for many years, in order, necessarily, to maintain its position as the world reserve currency because everyone wants the dollar, they have to have this current account deficit so that those dollars spread out to various parts of the world, but obviously that creates problems for the country internally.

That’s something called the Triffin Dilemma or the Triffin Paradox, people should look up. If your country is the world reserve currency you have competing domestic and international goals.
Your domestic goal is to try to keep the currency strong and to have a current account surplus, and the international goal is to make sure that the currency gets out to the four corners of the world and to have a account deficit so you have competing policies depending on whether you’re concentrating on the domestic or the international objectives.

All of that collapses of course, when and if the US dollar is eclipsed and as I mentioned before the the governor of the People’s Bank of China – the Chinese central bank back in, I believe it was in March of 2009, actually made a speech, talking about how the US dollar has to be eclipsed by the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights and those countries that have US dollars in their reserve have to be able to exchange them for Special Drawing Rights, when and if that kind of eclipse takes place.

And again for people who don’t know what Special Drawing Rights are, they are basically a currency that only exists on the international stage between central banks. It’s not a currency itself it’s a claim to currency, and right now the SDR is a claim to either US dollars, Japanese yen, Euros or British pounds. It can be converted into any of those and it can be used by central banks to settle their trade account differences internationally.

The Chinese have been angling since the 2008 collapse to be included in that basket, and in the 2010 review the IMF decided not to include the Yuan in the Special Drawing Rights basket because it is not an international currency, it’s not internationally convertible.

So over the past five years we’ve seen China scrambling madly to put in as much infrastructure as one could possibly do in five years time, to try to make the Yuan an international currency. We’ve seen that the creation of all of these trading houses all around the world, in Europe and in North America and Australia and other places around the world, where now Yuan payments can be transacted. We’ve seen the rise of correspondent banks in mainland China that are capable of doing international trade settlement in Yuan, and now of course with this new CIPS system, the SWIFT alternative that China is constructing, the idea of banks basically anywhere in the world that sign up to this system will be able to transact in Yuan instantaneously anywhere else in the world. That is another huge step towards making the Yuan an international currency and, lo and behold, wouldn’t you know the five-year review is coming later this year.

The IMF is going to be looking, once again at their basket for the Special Drawing Rights, and this time there may be a much better case to be made that the Yuan is an international currency and should be included in that basket.

I don’t know the time frame for this but certainly in the coming decades the SDR is going to, if all things remain equal, is going to eclipse the US dollar as the world reserve currency, and China is angling wholeheartedly to get included in that, and to really upset the entire infrastructure as it exists right now.

ALFRED ADASK: Well in their billboard they refer to the renmimbi as a new choice, and it implies that they’re not necessarily looking to take over as the only world reserve currency, but it almost implies they’re suggesting that maybe there could be two or three world reserve currencies, the renmimbi, the dollar, Special Drawing Rights. Is it possible that we could have a variety, three or four of them?

JAMES CORBETT: I think so, and in fact the Special Drawing Rights is a variety I mean it is a basket that’s convertible into any of those four currencies that I talked about, and if the Yuan is added then it would be five. That I think is the model, going forward, rather than having a single nation-state dominating over the world structure like we saw with Bretton Woods in the United States empire. I think the idea is while we’re going to have a multilateral world and the Yuan and the dollar and the pound are all going to coexist. And it’ll be inherently more stable because you won’t have this world superpower empire, that can print up as much money as it wants, dominating over the globe.

Now it will be this multilateral system something like, oh I don’t know, like the United Nations or something like that where all the nations have to cooperate together and it will lead to world peace and harmony.

Which is of course the rhetoric we’ve been hearing since at least the time of the League of Nations after WW1, and which leads inevitably to the globalist system that we know, that the powerful financial and politically connected individuals like the Rockefellers have been openly advocating for for decades and decades and decades.
Funny how it all works out exactly as they wanted.

ALFRED ADASK: Well at least so far it does seem that they’re on track for getting what they want, and if they get what they want, do you think they’ll be able to hold it? I mean it’s one thing to say give me control, it’s hard to resist the temptation of having the world reserve currency. Think of the power, think of everything you can do with it. Can China resist that temptation? And what about the powers that be that are setting the world they want to set up a global government. They might get to it but how long can it last?

JAMES CORBETT: From a cynical perspective I think that is probably the biggest ray of hope and optimism that we have, is that the backstabbing of these people, and there really are different factions that do compete for power, and the backstabbing of these psychopaths at the top trying to get into that position of ultimate power that seems to be being created, that might be the real chance that we have of defeating this, in so far as once they get that brass ring of power and all the power is consolidated, the idea of holding that power will be so tempting to so many different factions that it will be an unsustainable system, simply because they’ll be fighting with each other.

That is certainly something that would have to be carefully thought about, and I’m sure has been, behind the scenes, for a very long time so I’m not sure to what extent we can rely on that but it’s certainly something to think about, that once this world global empire power is created, how are they going to maintain that? How is that going to be transferred from generation to generation?
It’s a very real question of logistics that I’d like to think will pose some sort of problem to the idea of this global empire that I think is being created right now.

ALFRED ADASK: I’m going to move over to Ukraine…Here’s an article from Reuters that says ‘A year after fleeing Ukraine Yanukovich speaks of return’. Viktor Yanukovich was, as you know, former lawfully-elected president to Ukraine, he was ousted when the government of the United States fermented revolution in Ukraine about a year ago and replaced. He’s been in Russia and now he’s announced that he was ready to return to Ukraine if the opportunity arose, and my question is ‘Is Yanukovich just making an idle comment like ‘Gee I’d sure like to go home if I got a chance’ or is he being played like a pawn by Putin, to use him – send him back to Ukraine? And perhaps is he the one man who might be able to unite the two sides, at least put them into a measure of peace in the Ukraine, they put the lawfully elected president back and maybe the civil war stops? Does that make any sense?

JAMES CORBETT: It make sense from a certain perspective but I sincerely doubt that Yanukovych would be the peacemaker because of course he was the flashpoint for the the protest in the first place, and there is genuine resentment behind a lot of Western Ukrainians who believe that he was…I mean he was just a different type of oligarch than what exists now, whatever way you look at it, he was one that tended to fall more on the side of Putin and looking eastward, or at least that’s the way he was heading when the coup brought him down so I think that I will believe it when I see it. I really don’t think that Yanukovych will even be able to make it back into Ukraine and continue to live, let alone to actually taking political power again. I just don’t see that as a viable opportunity at this point. So I take that with a huge grain of salt, and as we know now, I mean even Putin has admitted that he was making plans as early as February of last year to save the life of Yanukovych by extraditing him to Russia so it seems pretty unlikely that he’s going to come back as some sort of political Savior at this point.

ALFRED ADASK: Alright James I just want to thank you for being on the program, we’re out of time. This is James Corbett from The Corbett Report. James will be back next Thursday, I’m Alfred Adask thanking all of you for listening we’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime the good lord bless you, me, James, the producer. Bye bye.