Category Archives: the dollar

A Review of Predictions of the Last Decade

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         December 31 is technically the end of the first decade of the 21st century.  It is perhaps an appropriate time to review one’s predictions.    It seems to me that I got some things right over the last decade.  Indulge me while I review the predictions that came true, before turning to those that did not work out as well.

Stock market peak     At the end of the 1990s, I felt that the dizzying ascent of equity prices could not continue into the new decade, that there was “…a bubble component in the stock market”  (Nov. 20, 1999).   This was four months before the bubble burst in 2000.  So far so good. read more

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Gold: A Rival for the Dollar

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     Robert Zoellick put a few sentences about gold toward the end of a column in today’s FT that are drawing a lot of attention.   I doubt very much if the World Bank President has in mind a return to the gold standard, but goldbugs and critics alike are talking as if he does.

      Even if one placed overwhelming weight on the objective of price stability — enough weight to contemplate a rigid straightjacket for monetary policy — gold would not be a suitable anchor.   The economy would be hostage to the vagaries of the world gold market, as it was in the 19th century:   suffering inflation during periods of gold discoveries and deflation during periods of gold drought.   This is well-known.   I am confident Zoellick understands it.   (He and I were in the same macroeconomics seminar at Swarthmore College in the 1970s.) read more

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The Dollar Share in Central Banks’ FX Reserves Resumes its Decline

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          Numbers newly reported from the IMF’s COFER data base show that in the most recent quarter, the spring of 2009, the share of central banks’ foreign exchange reserve holdings that they allocate to dollars resumed its downward trend.   The dollar share has been gradually sliding since the beginning of the decade – perhaps because of the birth of a possible rival, the euro, in 1999, or perhaps because of the long-term path of tremendous fiscal and monetary expansion on which the United States embarked in 2001.    read more

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