In any alternative media space, you are sure to find much talk about US dollar dominance, as well as optimistic forecasts of its imminent decline. This is also true in the radical right, where nationalists pine after an end to US imperial hegemony and the rise of a more multipolar world.
Often though, this hope is little more than wishful thinking, with unlikely challengers to US power much overhyped. This is especially true concerning US dollar hegemony, a topic that is ripe for misunderstanding at the best of times.
It’s important to keep in mind that people have been forecasting the decline of the dollar ever since it attained its status as global reserve currency. As far back as 1960, the economist Robert Triffin was warning of an “imminent threat to the once-mighty US dollar”. Understanding the reason for Triffin’s pessimism, and why it turned out to be misguided, is crucial to understanding today’s global monetary system and the enduring dominance of the dollar.
Triffin’s concerns were more informed than most: his “Triffin dilemma”, as it came to be known, highlighted an inherent problem with a country’s national currency also serving as the reserve currency of choice for the international system. The country supplying the world with the reserve currency has to produce a surplus of money, thereby creating a trade deficit. In other words, the supplier country needs to be continually losing money to fill up the reserves of other countries and make the currency a low-risk option to hold as a reserve. But if the supplier country becomes too indebted to the rest of the world in this scenario, then its currency ceases to be such a low-risk asset, and that’s the dilemma.
After World War II, the US sent lots of dollars abroad through the Marshall Plan, military spending, and the American middle-class importing lots of foreign goods. So how did the domestic US dollar get around Triffin’s dilemma? It didn’t.
Enter the Eurodollar
Triffin’s dilemma was especially a problem for the US dollar because it was backed by gold. After all, what would happen when the world needed more dollars than US gold reserves could back? Much like the kind of collapse that would happen if everyone tried to withdraw their money from banks at the same time, the whole system faced implosion if the US could not keep its foreign dollars backed up with gold.
The standard story is that this problem was resolved in 1971, when Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods international system and finally decoupled the US dollar from gold. But by this point, private banks had already long replaced gold exchange and quietly adopted a new form of exchange, extricated from any reserves or real currency, this was a truly global, offshore economic system outside the purview of central banks. This was the Eurodollar system. In this context, “Euro” is used as a synonym for “offshore” rather than referring to actual euros. So, the Eurodollar system is the shadow, offshore money system denominated in US dollars.
No one is really sure of how the Eurodollar system emerged (more on that later), but by the late 1950s there had been a huge growth in US dollar deposits in European banks, mostly in the City of London. With pre-war practices, these deposits would have been remitted to the central bank or deposited to the banks’ accounts in the U.S., but gradually, banks began to use these dollar deposits to issue loans denominated in US dollars. By 1959, the economist Paul Einzig reported that
The Eurodollar market was for years hidden from economists and other readers of the financial press by a remarkable conspiracy of silence. I stumbled on its existence by sheer accident in October 1959, and when I embarked on an enquiry about it in London banking circles several bankers emphatically asked me not to write about the new practice.
Britain’s economic goal of making London a center for international financial capital manifested in deregulation and comprehensive secrecy protections; this gave the city a competitive edge against other European countries, and put it and its web of British offshore territories at the very centre of this emerging system.
Since the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979, Britain has undergone a great experiment. Economically, the UK became the exemplar of neoliberalism in Europe. Politically, the UK has quietly transitioned to a postnational state, undergoing one of the greatest demographic transformations in the West.
As the Eurodollar market exploded, it became the lifeblood of the global economy, quickly fulfilling a need banks had for an international currency system. Banks could now transact rapidly and efficiently across countries and continents without the need of a physical currency, an innovation that helped unleash economic activity. The Eurodollar system functioned like an early cryptocurrency, existing as a digital ledger and communications network rather than a traditional currency.
Driving the global economy is a kind of bankers virtual currency, created by and used to satisfy the demands of banks, a series of claims and liabilities exchanged between banks to meet their monetary needs. How can you travel to Indonesia and make an instant withdrawal from an ATM, withdrawing from your local bank back home? Only with a vastly complex and efficient communications network connecting the global banking system.
The Eurodollar was the emergence of this system, and central banks have little control over it. For all the scare-mongering from libertarians about “Fed money-printing”, it is international bankers — outside the regulations of the US Federal Reserve — who are the ones in control of creating the US dollar supply on international markets. Big commercial banks create Eurodollars using the offshore system without the backing of the Federal Reserve. This is done through fractional lending, where dollar deposits are used as collateral to loan out a higher amount of dollars.
Again: private banks create money out of thin air by creating debt
Discovering money creation rests with private banks is a revelation that tends to shock people and send them into a state of denial — surely the state would not outsource something this fundamental to private actors.
But don’t take my word for it, a source as good as the Bank of England wrote in a report titled “Money creation in the modern economy” that:
Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves: banks create money whenever they lend to someone in the economy or buy an asset from consumers. And, in contrast to descriptions found in some textbooks, the Bank of England does not directly control the quantity of either base, or broad money. Of the two types of broad money, bank deposits make up the vast majority – 97% of the amount currently in circulation. And in the modern economy, those bank deposits are mostly created by commercial banks themselves.
So international bankers have created a shadow money system, with the Eurodollar system functioning as a kind of “dark energy” of the global economy, ever-present but unseen, something which the US Federal Reserve or any other central bank can do little to control. In fact, no one even knows how much money exists in the Eurodollar system, with estimates measuring it in anything from tens to hundreds of trillions. As the economist Fritz Machlup once told a meeting of his colleagues:
We don’t even know enough about the Eurodollar market to say that it should be controlled.
If you want to visualise what this shadow money system looks like, this is an attempt at illustrating all the instruments involved in the supply of the US dollar:
Still confused? You’re not alone. If this illustrates anything, it’s that the federal reserve and central banking is just a small part of the story. This enormously complex web developed over decades through private institutions, satisfying the need for a truly global money system unconstrained by national barriers.
But in the process of decoupling the dollar from Federal Reserve reserve control, bankers have given themselves the power to create unsanctioned and unregulated money. This translates to enormous power to override national government’s monetary policy and fulfill many of the roles most people assume central banks and their governments are handling:
Because Eurocurrencies give private financial institutions the unrestricted ability to expand the availability of a particular currency, the country whose currency is the target of the Euroinstrument no longer has exclusive control over its money supply.
…
Furthermore, the lack of reserve requirements on Eurodollars creates a potentially infinite money multiplier, potentially leading to an infinite degree of inflation, all without the input of the Federal Reserve or the U.S. Treasury. Thus, the power to control the number of dollars (or dollar-equivalent instruments) in the market has been taken out of the exclusive control of U.S. authority and diffused among foreign banking institutions.
Discussion around economics is still heavily focused on central bank monetary policy and government programs like Quantitative Easing, which helps maintain the illusion that it’s still accountable, elected representatives with the final say.
It’s understandable we are biased to focus on government institutions: it has always been understood that monetary sovereignty is a prerequisite for political sovereignty. But it is now clear that governments have quietly surrendered a great degree of monetary sovereignty to the private interests running the international banking system — one of the most significant and revolutionary political changes ever, yet one hardly discussed.
It’s shocking to discover the scope and influence of this system, and to discover everything presented here has been out in the open for years, strangely ignored or overlooked by popular economists, financial analysts and politicians alike. Yet some esteemed economists like Paul Einzig and Milton Friedman did identify and study this system, and both also wrote of a grand “conspiracy of silence” by the global banking cartel to hide its existence. Since most economic analysis still ignores it, we are left with an always partial view of how the economy functions.
The post How Shadow Banks Rule the World appeared first on LewRockwell.
Read More . . .|
| Tweet