Bill Murray and Ben Bernanke: independent financial advice
Posted by Don Martin on Wed, Apr 20, 2011 @ 01:02 PM
People enquire about the risk of the dollar collapsing. The WSJ quoted Russia's Putin today: U.S. Monetary Policy Is ‘Hooliganism’. I have written in “Government shutdown and dollar collapse” and “Investments for a dollar collapse” explaining that there is no substitute for the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Today’s WSJ article confirms that.
The talk about dollar collapse and the attempts by the Fed to reinflate the economy by weakening the value of the dollar remind me of the movie “Groundhog Day” where Bill Murray plays a character who tries to kill himself everyday but can’t. Every day it seems, metaphorically speaking, that the Fed tries to kill the dollar by increasing the money supply, or by “Quantitative Easing” (to devalue it), or by lending money to insolvent financial entities during the crash of 2008.
Yet no matter how hard they try they just can’t kill the dollar. Foreign governments have a need to prop up the dollar to fight competetive devaluations (currency wars) and they need to keep the value of the dollars that their Central Banks hold as reserves from declining.
However, the best analogy for the dollar maybe the British Pound that slowly depreciated after 1945. So the best solution to a weakening dollar is to diversify into other currencies, but do so with a cautious attitude and not with a hysterical attempt to flee from it. The risk is that despite a long standing paradigm that the dollar will continue to be propped up, there is the possibility that with enough attacks on its value that its value will eventually crack and fall through support levels and enter a new paradigm and trade at lower value.
This is an example of independent financial advice.