China had to make some concessions to get the yuan into the SDR basket.
Most notably they have committed to issue 3 month T-Bills every week and to allow foreign central banks to access their currency and bond markets.
Note also that this doesn't take place until October of 2016 so there should be no immediate impact on the markets. Also note the SDR has a very minor share of the global currency reserves so this is more symbolic at the moment.
Aha, I get it. I misread your statement. I thought you were saying that CNY is a small share of SDR, not that SDR is a small share of all global reservers. My apologies.
Yeah, I didn't know the details, but China for sure had to make some concessions to get in.
It will be interesting to see how much they allow their currency to float and how much more (if any) they will allow their citizens to expatriate the yuan.
A big deal has been made about this, however it was inevitable and the only logical thing to do. With the substantial Yen debasement, Japan's economy is now less than half the size of China's. That will fall to 1/4th in the next ten years. Even if China were to need to devalue their currency substantially over the coming years, as is being regularly argued now, that would pale in comparison to what Japan will do to its currency in the next decade or two in order to manage their debt disaster. There's no sound argument for keeping the Yuan out of that IMF basket. The next decade economically will be about the US and China, with Japan and Russia fading further into the background, and the Eurozone continuing to struggle with Europe showing zero net growth (the UK will be a bright spot in Europe thanks to not being part of the Euro (see: the depression it has put Finland in)).
You are not saying anything original here that is not the complete median view on the Street. Eurozone 0%: check. UK bright spot: check. Japan a debt disaster: check. Russia suffering: check. China/US the future: check.
There is nothing here that if followed, will allow anybody to outperform because this is complete consensus, it's what's priced in almost exactly. Yet the real alpha-generation skill is to challenge the received wisdom which here, is light years from happening.
How about the view that the a 9% yield in Russia is actually hugely more interesting than a 2% yield in dollars. What about the idea that 40$ oil is cheap as chips and the bargain of a generation? Maybe China's debt situation is, if we dig a bit deeper than the surface, much worse than Japan's, short term? Perhaps the UK is a financial bubble far too long of Arab money and that the Eurozone's current travails represent the small potential for light at the end of the tunnel on the view of renewal?
Not saying these are true, just that they might be worth considering.
Still, thank you for paraphrasing in one short paragraph exactly what I hear in my inbox in PDF form 20x per hour from the analyst community.
Sure, but you won't catch me disagreeing that the upcoming $30x oil price isn't a huge bargain. I think it is, and I think numerous oil companies are going to be tremendous investments at that point. Lots of commodity sectors are producing huge bargains already, and are likely to get cheaper yet. Anyone patient enough to hold long-term and suffer through the next few years, will be rewarded.
I don't think Russia is interesting. They're incapable of doing anything economically outside of commodities, and so long as the dollar is strong, Russia will be a mess. Putin has wasted his time in power on consolidating power, rather than diversifying the economy. They're a very low innovation, stagnate economy. That has resulted in the facade coming off, it's clear now that Putin has no clothes and can never cultivate a truly prosperous economy (their GDP per capita is now below Romania and Poland). It's the typical command economy outcome. Russian culture seems to spend all of its time being angry at the outside world for their self-inflicted wounds, creating an us vs them mentality, and it leads them to the same place every time: isolation. They have an intense victim mentality, and extremely low national self-esteem (which is where the projecting comes from and why Putin has to pretend to be a strong-man when he's the exact opposite).
You watch these documentaries on their culture, and it's almost unbelievable how backwards they are:
I agree that China is in very, very serious trouble when it comes to debt. They may be the most indebted nation per dollar of GDP at this point, including the huge sums of shadow debt stalking around their economy. However, I think it's more likely they'll stagnate for the next 20 years, Japan style, rather than suffer any near term sharp event. They've practically copied the mistakes Japan made perfectly. China's debt will eat most of their growth potential, until they either grow beyond it enough, or start paying it down.
Before today, I think the US dollar was about 60% of the SDR bucket of currencies.
For years I have read about probable problems if the US dollar was no longer the reserve currency, but it seems from what I have been reading that there is some sort of negotiated slow migration from the US dollar to using SDRs as the reserve currency.
I like slow and steady change, even is it means that eventually my country (USA) will lose a lot of economic advantage.
The USD has gone from 41.9 to 41.73% in the SDR basket. So, no change in the Dollar status. The Euro has gone down the most from 37.4% to 30.93%. The importance of SDR as a reserve currency is not accurate.
What problems have you read about the U.S. facing if it stopped being a reserve currency? My understanding is that we would lose seigniorage, and maybe see a small increase in borrowing costs.
But the upside is value of the dollar would drop, making U.S. exports more competitive.
IMO US federal debt will likely become an increasingly significant issue. Interest costs of losing reserve status may be small or large. It really depends on market confidence. And given historically low rates today, significant cost increases are not that unlikely if US loses influence on global of monetary policy. From this large cost increases could put the currency in a death spiral given ~450 billion annual repayment costs already at todays low rates.
Please note I'm not saying this will happen, but feel it should be a recognized risk if borrowing continues at the current trend. I believe this is an elephant in the room which is likely to cause a massive macroeconomic shock in 5-20 years. I simply cant see the current political parties making the sacrifice to address the unfettered debt growth. I too recognize most financial experts tend to disagree with this view.
They also have to allow more transparency and access into their financial markets. Being part of the club has costs too. They probably did it because they think they're ready for it.
China's debt today is over 200% of its GDP and may exceed 300% in five years. One hopes the IMF and China agreed on concessions will assist China in rebalancing its economy quickly, because as Petits' posting points out -- a disruptive end is near for the current model.
Internal debt is also internal asset, which net out to zero. China is a net international creditor. Its internal debt structure may have implications for its economoic future, but is not nearly as relevant as its current account balance for foreign holders of RMB.
Internal debt is not an asset because the debt holders are SOE's, provincial governments and companies too big too fail. Therefore the largest share of debt is public debt, and work must be done to raise incomes throughout China so that debt can be serviced by taxes on a healthy private sector.
Debt doesn't really matter when it's your own currency for your own country. For example, imagine you control a cult of 50 people and invent a currency (cultcoin). You can create a debt of 10 billion cultcoins and it won't affect the real wealth of the residents. What really matters more is the exports and imports to the outside world, and the value produced by the residents.
When debt is created, wealth is being transferred from the residents to the government. If the government fails to use the debt created to stimulate the economy in the long term, the impact will trickle down and the residents will find themselves poorer and not being able to be competitive enough for the outside world to demand their goods.
This depends on you talking about national debt or private debt. For national debt, the dynamic you describe holds true. But for private (households, companies) debt it does not as they do not have the capacity to create new money.
No. What matters is the ability of the majority of people to have decent jobs, such that the State can maintain economic and social stability. The ineffecincies huge debt driven growth create make stability long term impossible.
My country (USA) has benefitted hugely by being the reserve currency: effectively being able to generate money by fiat with lower chance of this causing inflation because other countries buy dollars and hold them in reserve to buy oil, etc.
I expect the economy in the USA will take a small gradual hit over the next decade as we lose (mostly exclusive) reserve currency status.
Weakening currency and a bit of inflation would be great for most people in the US, reducing unemployment, strengthening US experts, and reducing debt load for all the folks struggling to pay off their mortgages and student loans. Prices on imported goods would of course rise a bit, but prices on non-tradeables like healthcare, housing, and education would probably stop rising so fast, or might even drop a bit. For the last few years now the US has had too little inflation (this year it’s stuck close to 0%), and too strong a currency. Getting inflation up to about 2–3% annually (the Fed target is 2%) would be great.
This is nonsense. By that logic every country should continuously weaken it's currency in order to gain an advantage. So we would get caught in a descending spiral of every country constantly trying to have a weaker currency relative to its trading partners. If the USD weakened, which other currencies would strengthen and how do you think those other central banks would react?
Well obviously if everyone races to weaken their currency as fast as possible, that causes a lot of instability. A weaker currency hurts lenders and the wealthy, and drives up consumer prices, so it’s not some infinitely applicable strategy that can be endlessly pursued by everyone.
But the point is, the US dollar has been kept “artificially” strong for a good while now, which goes along with a structural trade deficit, current account deficit, low domestic savings rate, unemployment, rising prices of non-tradeable goods, and struggling US export industries. On the other side, countries with artificially weak currencies like Germany or China have had high domestic savings rates, trade surpluses, current account surplus, etc. This kind of imbalance builds up pressure over time, and isn’t stable in the long term.
> By that logic every country should continuously weaken it's currency in order to gain an advantage.
It might be an advantage for most people in the country (at least in the short term), but it would be a disadvantage (even in the short term) for the people with the most wealth, and, perhaps more specifically, for the people with the most power over monetary policy.
The advantages (particularly in the near term) that countries get from weakening currency is why the people who loan them money have come to insist than monetary policy should generally handled by independent central banks that are, while generally accountable in some way to government, also somewhat insulated from political pressure from the rest of government (and, often, with direct influence from the financial industry.)
You're missing the point. Every country would like to have a weak currency in order to boost exports. However every country can't have a weak currency simultaneously; it's mathematically impossible. If the USD weakens then other countries will respond by weakening their currencies in a race to the bottom.
We will be better off in the long run by not playing that game. Keeping the currency fairly stable helps to encourage long-term economic growth by allowing businesses and consumers to plan ahead. That's better than chasing a quick and unsustainable boost in exports through devaluation.
A weakening currency is probably aimed to boost exports.
I think in theory, say the US Dollar weakens, everything appears cheaper, exports increase.
US companies will then be able to employ more people within the country and thus improves employability and domestic consumption.
It makes us poor overall, if we consume imported products, travel internationally, and if the economic plan fails in which employability and domestic consumption does not increase. This can happen when other equally competitive countries counter by de-valuing their currency as well.
I'll give it a shot. If the U.S. dollar falls 30% against the Euro, suddenly Tesla cars are 30% cheaper for rich Frenchmen to buy. Maybe now the company makes a nice profit and goes on a hiring/investment spree instead of struggling to survive. Similarly for Boeing jets vs. Airbus jets, etc.
Mark, that's a good point. However, I don't know how much of the world's dollars are used to buy goods that are priced in dollars, but I suspect the holdings of the developing countries to defend their currencies dwarf the amount used to buy such goods. From http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/moneymatters/ss/How-Much-US-De... foreign governments own $4.5T of the US debt.
That guy is seriously confused. He seems to be referring to sectoral balances but doesn't realise that having the USD as the international reserve currency is what has allowed the US to consistently run trade deficits (where importing is a benefit to society and exporting is a cost), that the US government does entirely determine the ability of the US private sector to save USD and is able to pursue full employment because it is a sovereign currency issuing government, and that foreign central banks can only buy US treasury bonds in USD, and mostly do so with reserves earned by exporting to the US, with interest being paid in USD. The entire article is like economic sounding gibberish.
I've been following Mr Pettis for a while. I don't have a degree in economics, just a few classes and an interest. I like how he argues from identities, but can't vouch for his methods in the greater economic landscape.
I'm not sure I understand all of your argument, but would be interested in your counterpoints to point 6 of his appendix on that post. Perhaps he's missing some of the benefits of a reserve currency that you espouse.
Point 6 in his appendix is in counterpoint to his own article in that it states the benefits to the US of the USD being the international reserve currency. Wilson and Riley's article is accurate! However they fail to mention that US denominated debt is simply an instrument for controlling the overnight interest rate target, rather than a borrowing operation used to fund government spending (ie. it's not really "debt" at all) and that the US government has the capacity to pursue full employment because it runs a sovereign, floating exchange rate currency which gives it maximum domestic policy space. Wilson and Riley correctly state that running a trade surplus is a disadvantage to the local population in that exporting everything increases costs to local consumers -- exporting is a net cost, importing is a net benefit.
The Pettis post under discussion in this subthread is straight-forward analysis according to standard textbook models of international trade. Everything he says is right out of an intro undergraduate course on the subject.
I don’t understand why you find it confusing. Perhaps you could elaborate a bit? (Admittedly, this stuff is clearer when spelled out over 100 pages of a textbook with a bunch of examples, clear formulae, and discussion of competing theories, vs. condensed into a blog post.)
Wilson and Riley’s argument is pretty hand-wavey, full of entirely unsupported assertions. (Which is fair for a very short blog post, I suppose, but isn’t very convincing.) I’m not sure what they have to do with “Modern Money Theory”, which from what I gather in a quick web search disagrees sharply with their analysis.
I don't find it confusing, I find that the man is confused about economics. I already listed the main points in my post above, although admittedly this stuff is clearer when spelled out over 100 pages of a textbook with a bunch of examples, clear formulae, and discussion of competing theories versus a post on Hacker News[1]
MMT agrees with most of the points Wilson and Riley make (ie. that exporting is a cost and importing is a benefit, referred to in the article as "Seignorage", and lower transaction costs) but they're incorrect on the notion that one of the advantages of being the reserve currency is the ability to "run up huge amounts of debt at low interest rates" -- the US doesn't need to borrow US dollars, it creates US dollars. If they're referring to the advantage in being that the US private sector has been able to borrow US dollars from foreigners cheaply, then maybe that's a benefit I'm not really sure but they could just as easily have gotten that money from other banks with accounts at the Fed anyway (so long as there was sufficient cash reserves to satisfy the demand for dollars!)
Read his book The Great Rebalancing. There are pros and cons to it, whether you think it's an overall positive or overall negative likely depends on who you are and what interests you seek.
One thing I've learned, most people do not understand international trade or the balance of payments.
One thing I've learned: most people do not understand even the fundamentals of how money or the economy work on any level (including most economists, and most people who work in banking, finance and government). The level of ignorance is astonishing, at all levels.
I'm more than a bit skeptical of anything pre-1750 in that graph, because the "world's" reserve currency means something very different in today's global economy than what that graph appears to be using to define them.
Those might pass for European reserve currencies in a pre-Industrial Era, but they certainly do not reflect the world economy of the time period by any means.
In addition to all of that, the USD is the only currency on that graph that was not on a gold standard at the time. That's a huge difference.
Wouldn't the gold standard render the entire notion of a "reserve currency" meaningless, too? If you're holding a gold-backed currency then you're effectively just holding gold. Holding a currency as a "reserve currency" probably meant actually holding a bunch of gold in a vault. It hardly matters whose face was on it.
If "gold standard" had one narrow definition (something like each printed currency unit is back by a specific amount of gold and that amount doesn't float), then yes, it would render it meaningless.
But if the amount of currency issued can float relative to the gold reserves held, then the values of currencies relative to each other could still flow significantly.
Put another way, it's an issue of trust. If currency X and currency Y are both theoretically backed by gold, but it's far easier or more reliable to convert X into gold than Y, then X as a reserve would be more valuable than Y.
For most of the time covered by this graph, "gold standard" meant that the money was actually made out of precious metals, not merely that it had some official exchange rate with gold. Concerns about how the quantity of currency issued changes relative to the amount of gold held, or conversion to/from gold, simply wouldn't apply.
Depends when you were talking about exactly. Currency reserves were not necessarily a thing. In most countries all banks were private, so there were no official reserves. For example the Bank of England was only nationalised in 1946. Fractional reserve banking has been around for centuries.
> Wouldn't the gold standard render the entire notion of a "reserve currency" meaningless, too?
Yeah, it does. The more I think about it, the less sense that graph makes.
It's not entirely meaningless because there are still benefits to being the reserve currency in a gold-backed world (e.g. cheaper cross-border transactions from not having to do any forex). But the biggest impact of being the reserve currency today is on monetary policy, which only makes sense in the context of fiat money.
All a gold standard does is increase instability in the economy and reduce domestic policy space. It was abandoned for a very good reason, and typically would be abandoned often anyway even when it was "in effect". It's a ludicrous way to run an economy, similar to a pegged exchange rate.
You are correct, currency and financial systems today are vastly different. That site seems to be pushing the "THE PETROLDOLLAR IS DYING ANY DAY NOW" agenda.
Holding assets in dollar makes little sense for most people on the planet, and when these people become richer, it makes sense they will use their own currencies. With them, their companies. With those, their governments.
The EUR, despite current instability, and the Chinese Y have good chances.
> Holding assets in dollar makes little sense for most people on the planet, and when these people become richer, it makes sense they will use their own currencies.
You have a lot of misplaced faith in foreign central banks. A lot of foreigners absolutely do not trust their central banks, some even to the point of using the US dollar in their day-to-day transactions (Cambodia, various African nations, etc.)
If you're in the position where you don't trust your own central bank, why would you trust the Bank of China instead of the Federal Reserve? It's been around a lot less time and does not have the political independence the Fed does.
The dollar is going to be dominant for the rest of our lives IMO.
Well, for many people it makes sense to trust their own central bank more than a foreign one, especially when their nation is stable.
No matter what happens, I can pay my taxes and get food at the bakery in Euro. Even if the Euro crashes.
But if I hold Dollar, my government and bakery won’t take Dollar, so I’d have to convert – and lose or make money based on the exchange rate every time.
It’s the same reason why bitcoin isn’t effectively used: If you have to exchange currencies every time you try to buy something, the currency is worthless to you.
And for a billion chinese people, the Yuan is going to be the currency of choice. For 500 million europeans, the Euro is the currency of choice.
But only the US and a handful of instable african or island nations use the Dollar, all combined still less people.
For private holdings, the Dollar is going to lose power. (In fact, it has lost the majority of private holdings long ago)
Is an electron a particle or a wave? From a trading standpoint gold sometimes acts like a currency and sometimes like a commodity. Does the distinction even matter?
Various precious metals in the past have been used in coinage, and at times certain currency issuers have promised to exchange their currency for gold at a fixed rate, but at no time has gold been a currency. And yes the distinction matters -- goods do not buy goods. Goods buy money, money buys goods. Money, as a definition, should not be producable through the application of labour
"The gold specie standard arose from the widespread acceptance of gold as currency.[7] Various commodities have been used as money; typically, the one that loses the least value over time becomes the accepted form.[8] The use of gold as money began thousands of years ago in Asia Minor."
What advantages does the Yuan have over the USD? I think the next generation will value the transparency and predictability of issuance of a crypto currency similar to bitcoin has far greater advantages. Which doesn't mean that central bankers will be in favor of it. But it has a 'long shot' at getting on that graph.
That's a very big question. China has exchange controls, but only for residents of China. If you have access to Hong Kong, which the rest of the world does, you can exchange yuan for other currencies at market rates.
China's exchange controls are leaking at the rate of about $500bn a year.
It's worrisome that China's rich people want to get their money out of China. China is growing faster than the dollar or euro zones. Yet rich people in China are overpaying for US and UK real estate. What do they think is going to go wrong in China?
A few years ago there was that entrepreneur who was executed (!) for seeking funding improperly. I'm not sure guarding against seizure in the case of corruption charges is what people are thinking of; corruption charges might be unrecoverable.
What implications could this have for oil? Isn't oil bought and sold using US Dollars? I've always heard the World "Does Business" in US Dollars. Is this the beginning of the end for the Dollar as an international norm?
Modest implications. No more than the Euro or Yen at their peaks did.
No, it's not even remotely close to the end of the dollar as the international norm. The dollar is stronger today than it has been in 20 years, and it's gaining strength as the Eurozone and Japan are a mess.
The most likely outcome to this, is that the Yen loses the position it has held on the global stage for the prior 30+ years or so. Japan is the nation that will suffer the most as China's currency rises. Right now Japan is depending on the Yen as their only remaining prop to use against their debt; the weaker the Yen's global position, the less they can spread that debt monetization cost around. China's currency will become the dominant Asian currency; the Euro will remain the dominant European currency (unless something unexpected - and worse than it has already absorbed - happens to rip the union apart (that could be Finland bailing, triggering other nations to leave as well)); the dollar will remain the global reserve currency (there needs to be one, and the West is far more comfortable with that scenario than becoming more reliant on China, as are Japan and numerous China competitors in Asia).
Japan's debt is denominated in Yen. They don't have foreign denominated debt and they issue their own currency, therefore they're fine. The crisis in the Eurozone is due to the fact that members of the EMU gave up their currency sovereignty and can't make new Euros when they need to. Japan and Europe are in a completely different situation to one another.
The Yen was a credible currency in 1995, and it's now in much worse shape (both today and its outlook). The Euro was widely expected to pose a challenge to the dollar globally, which has not happened at all.
The dollar is as strong as it is even with 0% interest rates. Imagine if rates were even half the levels they were 20 years ago. I'd definitely make the argument the dollar is stronger today than it has been since the late 1990s when the US economy was riding very high.
In the next few years, most likely the dollar will gain more strength (the US budget is currently under control, growth is ok, and the employment picture continues to strengthen spurring tax growth), the Euro will be debased with more QE in mostly futile attempts to spur Eurozone growth, and the Yen will lose a lot more value. The Yuan is also likely to face significant devaluation as China struggles to grow in real terms, but it will at least see greater global share. Things are looking great for the dollar at least for the next ten years.
The Euro has acted as a strangling device for everyone in the union not named Germany. For Germany, it has enabled them to ride an artificially cheaper currency with their exports (were they using their own currency, it would be far more expensive). For Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece etc, the currency held them back by being even more expensive than their own currency would have been; for eg Finland, it has prevented them from making adjustments to become more competitive on numerous cost structures. The end result has been eight years of no net economic growth (and in recent dollar terms it's now far worse than that).
The lack of Eurozone growth will spur more QE for years to come. The US is presently done with its QE program, and there's nothing on the horizon that indicates it'll need to return to that in the next several years (large budget deficits would cause that, but so far Congress isn't growing spending in an out of control manner).
That context will push the Euro lower, and the USD higher versus. Until the Eurozone can show off serious growth (not 0.3%-0.5% type 'growth'), rapidly improving household balance sheets, and a significantly improving employment picture (not 11%), the Euro will struggle.
You're mostly right, unpleasant as that is in this case. One thing's wrong though: The ECB doesn't really have to care, and historically haven't cared, about growth and unemployment. The ECB is printing money because inflation is low, not because growth is low.
> The dollar was trading at about 0.75 to the Euro around 2009. What is a challenge in your eyes?
I can't say what adventured meant by a challenge, but it certainly wasn't that. The exchange rate with the dollar is just a function of how many euros exist. Challenging the dollar would be something more along the lines of "do people prefer to store their wealth in dollars or in euros".
> Man, where to start? Just because a country's basic unit of currency is worth more than ours doesn't mean the country is richer. If you think that 100 pennies is "richer" than 10 dollars because the absolute number is bigger, then we're not going to have much luck dealing with foreign exchange rates.
> A common myth is that if a currency is worth less than $1, it's weaker than the U.S. dollar, and if it's worth more, then it's stronger. Your Latvian friend is trying to pull this on you, but it's nonsense.
The only thing that could end the (petro-)dollar would be the intro of Bankor for international trade.
Meaning that if US wanted to buy something off china, it would have to convert USD into Bankor, then buy whatever from China, that would then turn those Bankor into Renminbi (or hold them for more imports).
This would mean that a import heavy nation would find their Bankor exchange rate plummeting etc, potentially balancing out trade.
As long as the USD is the international trade currency, USA can always print to cover needs. This in contrasts to various historical death spirals where a lack of exports and a constant printing to cover foreign expenses ran the currency into the ground.
While you present a compelling argument, I must respectfully disagree. I may catch some flack for saying it, and many people refuse to believe it, but the U.S. is insolvent. The value of the U.S. dollar is artificially propped-up. How long do you truly believe the Russias and Chinas of the world are going to keep using greenbacks? They will feign WWIII, Israel will expand to encompass 'Greater Israel' and U.N. will formally install global government, and USD will cease to be de-facto global currency.
Insolvent you say? The US owns 45% of all global wealth (per Allianz's global wealth studies, it was ~50% pre great recession, fell to about ~39% in 2010 as the US suffered heavy asset declines, and has rebounded back to around ~45% with the recovery in the US economy, that gap is mostly the arrival of China's wealth). The US is massively solvent in fact. Furthering this point, the US is now growing as fast as China in real terms (given pretty much every credible study indicates China is at least lying about half of their growth); the US is also gaining substantially against most of Europe, as its economy continues to grow faster than Europe even with a stronger dollar. South America and most emerging markets have been thrown into near-depression status, due to the stronger dollar. The US economy is likely to enjoy a very nice 10 or 20 year run in fact.
Russia's economy is now - as of the latest 2015 numbers - 1/12th the size of the US economy. It no longer matters as a global economic power (it still matters as a global commodity player). Its economy is smaller than Canada's now.
China will continue to use greenbacks because they will never have any other choice, the same as they'll continue using Euros. The US is back to being China's biggest trade customer (with the dollar having gained so much value): that trade is mostly done in dollars and that will continue.
You're talking about public debt, which is a small fraction of all US wealth holdings (household + corporate + government), and can be trivially managed. Further, unlike a lot of countries, the US has significant spare taxing capability (it rests in the middle tier globally on taxation). The US could easily raise $200 billion in new annual income taxes on the top 25% and not miss a beat - that single move alone would handle any potential issues from the public debt cost. Or better yet: the US can constrain its spending growth (as it has been), allowing income and assets to continue to outrun the problem.
And of course the US owns the global reserve currency, which enables it to export inflation to the rest of the world as a means to reduce the domestic hit of things like QE (which is why the Eurozone's QE hasn't been as effective). When the US uses the dollar to improve its fiscal circumstances, the rest of the world foots a big part of the bill. While that's sort of like cheating, it's an advantage the US possesses that nobody else does.
A sovereign currency issuing government doesn't need to raise taxes in order to spend, and the US government only issues USD denominated "debt" in order to target the overnight interest rate. The "debt" people talk about is not a borrowing operation.
My argument rests on the fact that the US economy is the world's #2 manufacturing economy, has among the highest median incomes (and median disposable incomes), has one of the most productive economies with one of the highest GDP per capita numbers, does not have a demographic bomb going off (Europe, Japan, China), is capable of being fully self-reliant on energy (which very few nations are), has a boom coming in energy exports via natural gas, continues to have one of the most innovative and dynamic economies, is growing as fast as or faster than competing major economies, owns 45% of all global wealth, has significant spare taxing capacity, US households dramatically reduced their debt to income ratio over the last five years (while most competing economies have seen increases in that ratio), and is the global leader across numerous major industries.
You picked out the one thing that is the easy trump card: the global reserve currency makes it all that much easier for the US.
I must disagree. The US has a shortage of employable workers as evidenced by the current unemployment rate relative to wages; it has a demographic imbalance where too few young people earn enough to support resources drawn by a much larger aging population; and there is no realistic excess taxing capacity for political and economic reasons outside the scope of this reply.
You're wrong. I believe you're referring to this statistic: "... 0.7% of the global adult population, and they account for 45% of global wealth"[1] The U.S., ON PAPER, holds about 1/4(25.40%) of global wealth not half. [2]
Allianz's 2015 report indicates North America holds 45% of all global financial assets. Unless you're pretending that Canada and Mexico hold 20% of all global assets, your figures are wildly off the mark (Canada is less rich than the US per capita on average, and Mexico is far less so); at a minimum the US holds 40% to 42% of all global wealth.
The US only has "debt" in USD and pays interest in USD which it creates. It deosn't even really have "debt" in the sense that it hasn't "borrowed" to fund any spending. The bond market just allows USD account holders at the fed to earn interest on reserves and is used as a tool to target the overnight interest rate. Nothing more.
No the Federal Reserve issues USD, not the US government, most people don't realise this fact and it is the difference between a sovereign nation and whatever the fuck North American countries have become today. Canada, where I'm from, had control of our central banking authority up until 1974, what little sovereignty we had(we are still a constitutional monarchy) was relinquished to international banking interests.
"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws!" - Mayer Amschel Rothschild
Firstly, anyone who mentions the name Rothschild in a conversation about economics cannot be taken seriously.
Secondly, the government creates dollars by spending -- when the US government spends, money is created. When the US government taxes, money is destroyed[1].
Same is true for the RBA in australia, it's even on their website[2]:
"As the Australian Government is a customer of the Reserve Bank, these payment flows can be very large. Expenditure by the Government adds ES funds to the account of the recipient (or their financial institution), while tax receipts have the opposite effect."
The US has several bizarre, self-imposed constraints like the "debt limit" and some crazy mechanism for the fed to buy treasury bills from the government that goes via the private banking system for no good reason but the net effect is the same. Government spending creates money and taxation destroys it.
In terms of ownership and control, the RBA is owned by the Commonwealth (probably the same for Canada) and the Fed is owned by private companies because of concerns about government control when it was setup (even though the Fed and the Treasury co-operate so much they might as well be the same institution) but ownership is very different from ownership of a normal company[3].
Most notably they have committed to issue 3 month T-Bills every week and to allow foreign central banks to access their currency and bond markets.
Note also that this doesn't take place until October of 2016 so there should be no immediate impact on the markets. Also note the SDR has a very minor share of the global currency reserves so this is more symbolic at the moment.