Yuan Collapse: Trade War Prelude to Monetary Reform, Fiat System Implodes From Periphery to Core
See the link above for a little more discussion and links, riffing off the latest from Russell Napier.
It has been an unpopular position many years and remains an unpopular position: the U.S. dollar system dies by deflation, not inflation.
Most scenarios of a dying dollar involve a collapsing greenback. However, this ignores that many countries manage their currencies to be weaker than the dollar. They would love to borrow and leverage up against a tumbling currency experiencing rapid credit growth.
Additionally, abandoning the U.S. dollar would involve crashing the global economy since the U.S. would be running monster current account deficits in such a scenario, as it was in the mid-2000s amid China's rapid ascent.
A more plausible scenario is dollar deflation. When the dollar is in deflation or disinflation, it is reducing or growing credit more slowly than the rest of the world. Those who finance in dollars have a harder time paying it back. This constrains foreign economies. They have the choice of absorbing the deflation to maintain their exchange rates or inflating their own money and credit systems.
China's slowing economy is a complex issue, but one factor is its attempt to defend the value of the yuan as the U.S. entered a disinflationary/deflationary cycle. The yuan depreciated in 2008, 2011/12, 2014-2016, and now again in 2018 because it has been expanding money and credit more quickly than the United States even adjusting for disparate GDP growth rates.
The 1997 Asian Crisis was a dollar crisis (dollar/debt default) in the Asian Tigers. Their currencies collapsed in value. Credit bubbles burst and their balance sheets were cleaned by the collapse in currency. Similarly, a collapse in China's currency would clean its economy for a new growth era.
Moreover, such a collapse in the currency would be the perfect moment to launch a new monetary system no longer tied to the U.S. dollar, or at least one where the U.S. dollar is no longer the core of the system, but only one currency among many reserve assets.
Watch DXY. If the dollar has peaked, China and emerging markets will see financial pressure alleviate. Global growth will rise and be financed by rapid U.S. credit growth. Even if the dollar collapses in real value, if all currencies depreciate with it, the global reset could take place. Few, if any, countries will defect from a collapsing U.S. dollar in the early stages because they would slide into deflation and suffer an economic depression as their export sector shrinks.
If the dollar hasn't peaked and still has a new high ahead of it, it could be an incredible high that all but the most extreme forecasters would predict, should it lead to a change in the global monetary system.
