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Comment by bensonn | Hacker News Reader

From "Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis", which I read too many years ago to clearly remember, this was a economic war strategy. During economic war-games the Pentagon set up this strategy was successfully employed.

China, Russia- the "anti-west" powers started buying gold, dumping US debt and finally proposed creating their own currency for regional trade instead of using the USD as their reserve currency.

This is a summary based on a book I can't really remember and concepts I might not have understood. That said, I do remember it was a good book, worth a read.

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Individual Chinese, Russian, and Saudi billionaires generally invest heavily in US based investments (real estate, stocks, bonds, etc..) as a hedge against the political and legal uncertainty in their own countries. The US at this point is basically the safety deposit box for the world elite, and until that changes I highly doubt there will be much interest in coordinated economic war against the US. There will be some posturing and saber rattling though.

You think the prediction made in this book about returning to a gold standard can still happen?

Now Facebook has Libra to replace US dollars.

This is not much of an "economic war" strategy, TBH - it's just a very visible signal of the "hey, we hate the U.S." sort. The "reserve currency" one uses as part of world trade is immaterial, except for convenience; the U.S. are not perceptibly better or worse off as a result of such choices.

Tariffs and trade barriers though? Now, there's some "economic war" if I've ever seen it! "When goods won't cross borders... armies will."

>the U.S. are not perceptibly better or worse off as a result of such choices.

How is that true? We can print more dollars. We don't have the same kind of control over other currencies.

"You can print more dollars" only as long as market participants trust that you're not going to print too many dollars - as soon as you try to do anything of the sort, your status as "safety deposit box of the world" goes away. That's not much of a privilege!

In most of the analyses I've read, the petrodollar has been of huge benefit to the US - effectively propping it up in the face of massive QE efforts and (in theory) allowing much more to be printed to service debts than would otherwise be sustainable.

I mean, there must be some reason that trading or threatening to trade oil in Euros is practically asking for some kind of forced regime change.

>In most of the analyses I've read, the petrodollar has been of huge benefit to the US - effectively propping it up in the face of massive QE efforts and (in theory) allowing much more to be printed to service debts than would otherwise be sustainable.

It's not as simplistic as good or bad for the country. If have a good job and you want to buy a lot of imports then it's good. If you want to be a factory worker it's bad because what you make is more expensive for other companies to buy.

Sure, a weak currency is better for basic exports. It's widely accepted that Germany prefers a weaker euro to a stronger mark.

We can look at the US's behaviour, though, to determine whether they think it's valuable to them or not. It's had every year since the petrodollar was established post WW2 to push the world towards using the Euro and instead has fiercely defended it.

> they think it's valuable to them

"They" in this case are the elected politicians that are in the "good jobs that buy imports" category and/or dependent on that category for political support.

It’s not that simple. Being the reserve currency also puts weird pressures on the US economy when other economies have issues. The total effect of which is probably not well understood.

“ COMMISSION RECOMMENDATION

    of 5.12.2018

on the international role of the euro in the field of energy ”

https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/c-2018-8111-recom...

Does that mean the EU is going to be forcibly regime changed?

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