SDR - New World Money

[gfp927z]

>>> IMF’s ‘Substitution Fund’ to kick-start SDR as new global currency?

(Part 1 of 2)


August 2016

http://www.cdfund.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/SDR-Special-aug2016-DEF.pdf


After seven years of Chinese pressure, a plan allowing investors to exchange their U.S. Treasury holdings for SDRs through a ‘substitution fund’ is being discussed

The Big Reset (2013) fully explains the need for a major reform of the world’s financial system. At that time of publication, most people still had no clue what form the unfolding financial endgame would take. A few years further on, and as interest rates have reached a level not seen
in 500 years, many are now starting to agree major monetary changes are needed urgently.

Two major problems need to be addressed. First we will need to find a new anchor for the world’s monetary system, and secondly, worldwide debt restructurings, comparable to debt jubilees in ancient times, have to be arranged. Debt jubilees are still a step too far in the current
global mental state, hence full focus is on the structuring of a new anchor.

Since the outbreak of the financial crisis, the Chinese have pressured the U.S. to change the current dollar-based monetary system. The Chinese, ever more in the driving seat of global finance, have made it very clear that the Special Drawing Rights (SDR or IMF-money) of the IMF is the preferred future international world reserve currency. A great example of China’s frustration over U.S. monetary policies can be found in comments distributed by the Chinese official state press agency Xinhua a few years ago;

‘Politicians in Washington have done nothing substantial but postponing once again the final bankruptcy of global confidence in the U.S. financial system’

These words echoed complaints about the dollar from Zhou Xiaochuan, the most powerful Chinese central banker and governor of the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), shortly after the fall of Lehman Brothers. He claimed the dollar has led to increasingly frequent global financial crises since the collapse in 1971 of the Bretton Woods system, when president Nixon cancelled the gold backing of the greenback.

In an article published on the PBoC’s website, in 2009, he
called for ‘a sweeping overhaul of the global monetary system’ and proposed for the dollar to be replaced by the IMF’s Special Drawing Right (SDR).1

The SDR, an international reserve currency (asset) created by the International Monetary Fund in the late 1960s, could serve ‘as the light in the tunnel for the reform of the international monetary system’, he believes.

___________________________________________________________


A new global financial order’ has been subject of high-level discussions for the past few years

Now some seven years later, the preparations for such an overhaul by using SDRs, seems to be well underway. The Chinese leadership has been speeding up the internationalization of the Chinese Renminbi so it can officially be added to the SDR by October 1st 2016. Currently, the
SDR is a currency basket of the four most important currencies, the dollar, euro, pound and yen. Once the renminbi is added as a fifth currency, the SDR will be ready to be used as a truly
world currency.

Wall Street insider James Rickards was the first to explain the importance of SDRs in his books:

‘The brilliance of the SDR solution is that it solves Triffin’s dilemma. Recall that the paradox is that the reserve-currency issuer has to run trade deficits, but if you run deficits long enough, you go broke. But SDRs are issued by the IMF. The IMF is not a country and does not have a trade deficit. In theory, the IMF can print SDRs forever and never go broke. The SDRs just go round and round among the IMF members in a closed circuit. Individuals won’t have SDRs. Only countries will have them in their reserves. These countries have no desire to break the new SDR system, because they’re all in it together. The United States is no longer the boss. Instead, you have the “Five Families” consisting of China, Japan, the United States, Europe and Russia operating through the IMF. The only losers are the citizens of the IMF member countries—people like you and me—who will suffer local-currency inflation. I’m preparing with gold and hard assets, but most people will be caught unaware, like the Greeks who lined up at empty ATMs in June 2015. This SDR system is so little understood that people won’t know where the inflation is coming from. Elected officials will blame the IMF, but the IMF is unaccountable. That’s the beauty of SDRs—Triffin’s dilemma is solved, debt problems are inflated away and no one is accountable. That’s the global elite plan in a nutshell.’2

We know that the structure of ‘a new global financial order’ has been subject of high-level discussions for the past few years, and that the role of China in these is prominent.3 Participants from the UN, World Bank and IMF talked about ‘the new framework for the global financial
and economic system’ for three days in late 2014, during the prestigious Chinese International Finance Forum (IFF). Jean-Claude Trichet, the former president of the ECB, also a co-chairman of the IFF, told the forum via a video link: ‘New rules have been discussed, not only inside advanced economies, but with all emerging economies, including the most important emerging economy, namely, China.’

_______________________________________________________


The last monetary reset of the ‘global financial order’ was executed in 1944

This news was later confirmed by a high-ranking executive of China’s largest bank (ICBC) who remarked: ‘With the status of the U.S. dollar as the international reserve currency being shaky, a new global currency setup is being conceived.’

The last monetary reset of the ‘global financial order’ was executed in 1944, at the end of World War II, when the U.S. invited 44 countries to the Bretton Woods conference. The U.S. proposed a new monetary system centered on the U.S. dollar, which would be backed by gold. The U.S. convinced the European countries with the American promise that paper dollars could always be exchanged for gold. This promise was the only reason the Europeans accepted the American plan.

However, when the U.S. started to print large amounts of dollars in the 1960s to finance the Vietnam war, more and more countries became nervous about the future value of the dollar and started to exchange surplus dollars for gold. In just a few years, the U.S. lost half of their
20,000 tonnes gold reserves. This was a drain to the U.S., and in the summer of 1971, President Nixon therefore refused to exchange an extra few hundreds of millions of dollars of the Bank of England for gold. He decided to ‘close the gold window’. In a nationwide television address
he announced:

‘I have directed to suspend, temporarily, the convertibility of the American dollar into gold [..] in full cooperation with the IMF and those who trade with us we will press for the necessary reforms for a urgently needed new international monetary system’.

This decision is seen as a U.S. default, since it not longer could fulfill its 1944 obligations. In the years after this ‘Nixon shock’, a number of ideas about reforms for the international monetary system were being discussed. The issue with SDRs as a true reserve currency thus far had been its lack of liquidity. There were simply not enough SDRs in circulation for it to play a major role in international monetary finance. To cope with countries that wanted to get rid of large dollar
positions, a ‘Substitution Fund’, run by the IMF, was proposed. This fund could facilitate a direct exchange of dollars for SDRs. The liquidity issue would be resolved with one stroke of the
pen, as an SDR would be created for every dollar that was exchanged.

But this concept never materialized because the dollar crisis waned after Paul Volcker introduced a shock therapy with interest rates exceeding 10%. Volcker’s drastic measures worked, so the U.S. no longer had an interest to promote the SDR. The substitution fund was little more than a thought experiment, until the Chinese brought about its revival earlier this year. In the May 2016 edition of International Monetary Review,
China’s most prominent international monetary magazine, an article titled ‘Revive the IMF’s SDR Substitution Fund’ was published. It explained in detail how a transition from a dollar centered system towards an IMF-SDR system was planned as early as the early 1970s:4

__________________________________________________________

An SDR Substitution Fund could well be the best approach to kick-start the SDR


‘In 1972, at the IMF Annual Meetings, then U.S. Treasury Secretary George Shultz offered the international community a bold plan to reform the international monetary system and end the special role of the dollar as a reserve currency. The U.S. proposal came after a complete disruption of the then existing monetary order and as key countries growing mistrust in the U.S. administration’s willingness to make necessary economic policy adjustments to ensure the stability of the dollar.

Shultz presented the outlines of a plan including: Substituting the dollar for the SDR to become the formal numeraire of the system, offering an exchange of existing reserve assets (dollars) into other reserve assets […] In 1979 the IMF reconsidered a substitution account to exchange dollars for SDRs. The idea attracted considerable interest and consisted of an account administered by the IMF that accepts deposits on a voluntary basis of eligible dollar-denominated securities in exchange for an equivalent amount of SDR-denominated claims.’

Now, almost 40 years after its introduction, an SDR Substitution Fund could well be the best approach to kick-start the SDR as a truly World Reserve Currency (WRC). If only half of the almost 20 trillion outstanding U.S. treasuries would be exchanged through this Substitution Fund, almost 10 trillion of SDRs would be created instantly. The SDR would become one of the most liquid financials instruments almost immediately. A number of (academic) publications about this topic have been published recently. The most important one is working paper no. 444 by the BIS titled ‘Reforming the international monetary system in the
1970s and 2000s: would an SDR substitution account have worked?5

‘One recently revived proposal would transform U.S. dollar official reserves into claims denominated in the IMF’s key currency basket, Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) […] a substitution account would have allowed central banks to diversify away from the dollar into the IMF’s Special Drawing Right (SDR)’.

‘To diversify away from the dollar’ is central banker speak for dropping the U.S. dollar as the anchor for the world’s monetary system. A dollar panic has to be avoided at all cost, so the diversification has to be ‘orderly’ according to this study: ‘The scope for supporting the orderly diversification of reserves via a mechanism allowing their conversion into SDR-denominated claims could be re-examined […]

The prospect of a destabilising rush out of the U.S. dollar led the Committee of Twenty (representing the executive directors of the IMF) to consider a substitution account in 1973-1974. The plan would allow official reserve holders to replace a portion of their foreign exchange reserves with SDRs, issued by a special account overseen by the IMF. By February 1973, the U.S. Treasury was prepared to envisage a one-time conversion of some existing U.S. dollar reserves into SDRs, replacing
liabilities to national creditors with a liability to an IMF-based substitution account

[…] Lurking behind these issues was the European desire to require the U.S. Treasury to amortise the dollar assets in the fund over time by exchanging them for SDRs. Europeans saw such settlement of dollar obligations in a medium not created by the United States as making the International Monetary System more symmetric and as exerting collective control over international liquidity.’

________________________________________________________________

‘The dollar’s last days?’, also elaborates on the idea of a dollar-SDR Substitution Fund


Another publication, from 2009, written by Onno Wijnholds, a former Dutch Executive Director of the IMF and titled ‘The dollar’s last days?’, also elaborates on the idea of a dollar-SDR Substitution Fund: 6 ‘a substitution account to absorb unwanted U.S. dollar reserves and increase the role of the SDR have attracted International Monetary System reformers for over 30 years. In the 1970s, part of the appeal of such schemes was to develop a mechanism that might ultimately require the United States to redeem its liabilities in SDR, or at the very least would create an SDR-denominated reserve asset that could rival
the dollar.’

This idea by Wijnholds was also discussed in a OECD publication that same year: 7 ‘The approach attracting most attention is a new global reserve system based on an extended version of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights (SDR), an international reserve asset set up in 1969 to supplement member countries official reserves. Building on the SDR, the main global reserve currency would be represented by an extended basket of significant currencies and commodities.

The UN-appointed Stiglitz Commission on reforming the international monetary and financial system has suggested a gradual move from the U.S. dollar to the SDR. Moreover, following the G20 Summit in London earlier in the year, the IMF plans to distribute to its members $250 billion in SDRs. But as this will increase the share of SDRs in total international reserves to no more than 4%, some extra steps will be needed. To make the SDR the principal reserve asset via allocation, close to $3 trillion in SDRs would have to be created. One expert, Onno Wijnholds, has suggested a so-called SDR substitution account. This would permit countries who feel their official dollar holdings are uncomfortably large to convert dollars into SDRs.

Because conversion would occur outside the market, it would not put downward pressure on the dollar. This suggestion, however, carries exchange risks because the SDR substitution account is likely to hold mostly dollars. Another step to enhance the SDR would be to make its currency composition more neutral to global cycles and more representative of the shift in economic power witnessed over the last two
decades. This implies an increase in the commodity content and the inclusion of major emerging-market currencies.’

____________________________________________________

(continued)