Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by thedudeabides5 | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

thedudeabides5

Ok so sell USD to buy what?

EUR? How about after they figure out Italy

JPY? More debt than US and lower rates.

CNH? Ha

Gold? Sure, but it’s not a currency

View on HN

Why are you set on holding currencies? I think Dalio is a clown, but I do like his pithy “Cash is Trash”. There’s not really any compelling reason to hold a modern fiat currency except to satisfy liquidity requirements. Gold, Bitcoin, plain old equities, whatever, all provide some measure of relief from the inflationary treadmill.

That argument is literally called out as "the biggest push-back I receive" and the largest section of the article is devoted to addressing it.

But she misses the demographics. The US has some of the best demographics of the G20. Germany, Japan, and China all have much worse demographics, and will change into net spenders (i.e. retirees) instead of net savers.

Within about 4-10 years (depending on the country), they will be producing less and less for export to the US.

Heck, Germany’s GDP is roughly 50% exports. That’s unsustainable.

US policies are turning more inward, and countries that rely on exports to us will suffer.

The dollar will be strong for the foreseeable future. It may go up and down a bit, but overall it will be very high. The dynamic driving currencies is very different from even 5 years ago.

As production moves out of China, they will get weaker. We have already seen peak China (and US voters will insist that drugs and PPE are produced in the US so we don’t run into a supply chain issue like we’ve seen over the past two months.)

The EU banks (well, certainly the German ones) are basically insolvent. They were never recapitalized after 2008, and have limited power.

So there is nobody around to challenge the US. As well capitalized consumers, the US controls their future.

Also, gold is expensive like hell right now. As COVID winds down, I would expect markets react vigorously and gold in free fall. It's also important to know that long term holding of gold has fairly lower relative returns compared to S&P and also no dividends. So only suckers would get in to gold right now.

Unless you are a very long term gold trader with very deep expertise, I would almost guarantee that the market knows a lot more about the correct price of gold than you do. It's not "expensive as hell" but likely fairly priced.

This view that market knows the best is actually quite misguided. Market does prices assets correctly after long enough period of time but it oscillates and bounces a lot before that happens. It's wrong to say that any point in time market knows the best and current price are exactly the fair price. If this was true, asset prices simply don't keep swinging 10% for days on. Gold isn't worth $100 at 9 AM and suddenly becomes worth $70 at noon.

Most gold proponents would say gold being money and not a "currency" is the whole point.

Japan has the opposite problem of the United States. Where as we spend with reckless abandon, like an alcoholic chugging shots, they have the opposite problem of literally hoarding cash and having massive savings.

KRW (Korean) is interesting, although I'm hardly an expert in currency trading.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com