THE TELEGRAPH: “This may prove to be the dollar’s epochal moment – the moment historians look back at as its major turning point.”
Whether or not tomorrow’s accounts of today’s turmoil prove David Owen of Dresdner Kleinwort right; whether or not this is the beginning of the end of the dollar’s pre-eminence in the world’s central banks and foreign exchanges, the economic landscape has undoubtedly changed forever.
The US taxpayer bail-out of America’s banking sector is an event whose significance will reverberate for many years. What it means for free markets, for the way Western economies are run, for the prosperity of the world economy, must remain to be seen.
But as investors scrambled to make sense of last week’s events, already one conclusion was all but irrefutable – the US dollar will have to take another major fall.
The dollar rally that began in July and pushed the pound’s value against the greenback significantly lower has come to an abrupt end as markets face up to the fact that the currency will have to absorb the effects of a sudden shocking increase in America’s budget deficit.
When Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson announced that the world’s biggest economy was about to embark on the world’s biggest bail-out for its financial sector, the first concern economists had was about the long-term prospects for the nation’s finances and its currency.
Might the dollar now be vulnerable to a run? In the longer term, might this signal the beginning of the end for the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency? US Dollar Set to Be Major Casualty of Hank Paulson's Bailout >>> By Edmund Conway | September 22, 2008
The Dawning of a New Dark Age – Paperback (US) Barnes & Noble >>>
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