Free Republic

Republicans rode a wave of voter discontent to secure control of the U.S. Senate and strengthen their grip on the House of Representatives in a punishing blow to President Barack Obama that will limit his power in his last two years in office. Financial markets saw the election results as a cause for optimism. Similar situations in the past have often sparked U.S. stock market rallies.

Julia La Roche October 31, 2014The Federal Reserve ended quantitative easing this week. And soon it'll start tightening monetary policy with interest rate hikes. This is coming as central banks in the rest of the world maintain loose monetary policy or even go as far as to loosen monetary policy further. All of this is bullish for the US dollar relative to other major currencies. Business Insider recently asked the smartest people in finance for what they considered to be the "most important charts in the world." Without hesitation, former global macro fund manager Raoul Pal sent us a long-term...

If you go to different websites or listen to certain radio hosts, there is a lot of discussion of "economic collapse", "dollar collapse" or "petrodollar collapse" and so forth. They make it sound like we will end up like the Weimar Republic with people carrying their worthless money in wheelbarrows. I am not an economics expert (nor do I play one online), but are we really heading for collapse or is it all a bunch of talk? I know we have a huge debt problem, but we keep printing money. How long can this keep going? I am confused! Any...

October 05, 2014 Tony_Caldaro Beautiful Indian summer imitation where I’m presently located in western Europe. Good time to start out with an empty sheet of text file (for lack of a better term), and stream some consciousness. Most people must have figured out that things in the economic sphere haven’t gotten any quieter lately. That’s at least something. Stock exchanges in the developed world jumped from a -1%+ loss one day to a 1%+ gain the next. Volatility, nerves, and probably ritalin, have returned. You have to wonder what that means in markets reigned supreme by high-frequency robot traders and...

Maybe the U.S. economy, a weakling for the last six years, is finally starting to flex some muscle. We’re referring to the return of King Dollar. For those who haven’t been paying attention, the greenback is in the midst of a rally not seen since the 1990s. It’s racing past the euro, the yen, and other currencies. Investors worldwide are buying the equivalent of stock in America, Inc. If the rise in the dollar’s valuation is sustainable, it’s welcome news for the stock market, for fighting inflation, and for U.S. growth prospects. Ronald Reagan said it best: A strong dollar...

Elena HolodnySeptember 19, 2014 David Rosenberg, Chief Economist & Strategist at Gluskin Sheff, surprised everyone when he adopted a more bullish view in 2013. On Friday he released a research note that included a brief and pretty optimistic summary of the US economy. Here's what it said: United States In the US, the economy is starting to fire on all cylinders for the first time this cycle. The strong US dollar is a source of margin support for importers which is great news for many consumer cyclicals. Tack on stepped consumer credit growth, job and wage gains, gasoline price relief,...

If, when in February Victoria Nuland infamously launched a (not so) covert campaign to replace the ruling Ukraine president oblivious to the human casualties, resulting in a civil war in east Ukraine, NATO encroachment along the borders of Russia, and a near-terminal escalation in hostilities between Ukraine, Russian, and various regional NATO members, the US intention was to provoke the Kremlin so hard that the nation with the world's largest reserves of mineral and energy resources would jettison the US Dollar and in the process begin the unraveling of the USD reserve currency status (as much as Jared Bernstein desires...

There are few truisms about the world economy, but for decades, one has been the role of the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It’s a core principle of American economic policy. After all, who wouldn’t want their currency to be the one that foreign banks and governments want to hold in reserve? But new research reveals that what was once a privilege is now a burden, undermining job growth, pumping up budget and trade deficits and inflating financial bubbles. To get the American economy on track, the government needs to drop its commitment to maintaining the dollar’s...

Money launderers will increasingly move away from the US dollar to the renminbi as US authorities continue to crack down on international banks’ AML systems [says] Freddie McMahon, director of strategy & innovation at Anomaly42, a specialist in AML and terrorist financing. “The dollar is becoming increasingly high risk and it’s a level of risk money launderers are proving less willing to take...the renminbi is off the beaten track and affords a new level of camouflage for criminal transactions." “The irony is that proactively countering the money launderers represents an unprecedented opportunity for the Chinese authorities to make the renminbi...

Aug. 27 will officially go down as a red letter day in the history of reserve currencies and dollar hegemony in how oil and gas are purchased throughout the world. In a new announcement from the Russian business media source, Kommersant, Gazprom has conducted the first sale of oil in a currency other than the dollar, and will henceforth open their purchase window to accept both Roubles and Yuan for the exchange of oil and gas products. Beginning today with an 80000 ton oil shipment from their Arctic fields, Gazprom Neft agreed to new terms on the sale and transfer...

Several months ago, when Russia announced the much anticipated "Holy Grail" energy deal with China, some were disappointed that despite this symbolic agreement meant to break the petrodollar's stranglehold on the rest of the world, neither Russia nor China announced payment terms to be in anything but dollars. In doing so they admitted that while both nations are eager to move away from a US Dollar reserve currency, neither is yet able to provide an alternative. This changed in late June when first Gazprom's CFO announced the gas giant was ready to settle China contracts in Yuan or Rubles, and...

August 24, 2014 By: Money_Morning Shah Gilani writes: This is a warning. I’m not kidding.I heard something yesterday that blew me away. My friends know I like to target shoot. I don’t hunt, because I can’t kill anything living, but I like guns. Maybe it has something to do with wanting to be James Bond when I was a kid… OK, I still want to be 007. As other target shooters know, it’s gotten harder and harder to get ammunition. Fo a few years now, all kinds of stuff have been going around on the Internet about why ammunition is...

The last 3 months have seen Russia's "de-dollarization" plans accelerate. First Gazprom clients shift to Euros and Renminbi, then the UK signs currency swap agreements with China, then NATO ally Turkey cuts ties and mulls de-dollarization, Switzerland jumps in the currency swap agreements, and BRICS create their own non-US-based funding vehicle, and then finally this week, Russia's oligarchs have shifted cash holdings to Hong Kong. But this week, as RT reports, Russian and Chinese central banks have agreed a draft currency swap agreement, which will allow them to increase trade in domestic currencies and cut the dependence on the US...

Russia Delivers Blow To Petrodollar In Historic $20 Billion Iran Oil Deal Russia signed a historic $20 billion oil deal with Iran to bypass both western sanctions and the dollar based western monetary system yesterday. President Putin Admire Gold Bar (London Gold Delivery Bar) Currency wars are set to escalate as the petro dollar’s decline continues. Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak and his Iranian counterpart Bijan Zanganeh signed a five-year memorandum of understanding in Moscow, which included cooperation in the oil sector. “Based on Iran’s proposal, we will participate in arranging shipments of crude oil, including to the Russian market,”...

Geneva (AFP) - The Swiss and Chinese central banks signed a currency swap agreement in Beijing on Monday, marking an important step in the development of a market for yuan in Switzerland, the Swiss central bank BNS said. The agreement, highlighting steps towards international use of the yuan, ensures that Swiss francs will be available in China and that yuan, also known as renminbi, will be supplied to financial centres in Switzerland. The BNS statement said that the agreement was "an important step" for the renminbi business in Switzerland. The agreement permits the two central banks to buy up to...

On July 21, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan spoke in an interview with Turkey's ATV television, and confirmed that his office had cut off direct communications with President Obama, and in fact, were no longer even answering calls received from the White House. In addition to this startling announcement regarding a long standing U.S. ally, the Russian Ministry of Economic Development followed this up with a press release that stated that Turkey was quickly moving away from their reliance on the dollar as the global reserve currency, and is seeking increased trade with Russia in a mutually beneficial exchange of...

In early July 1944, delegates from 44 countries gathered at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. A three-week summit took place, at which a new system was agreed to regulate the international monetary and financial order after the Second World War. The US was already the world’s commercial powerhouse, having eclipsed the British Empire several decades earlier. America was also on course to be among the victors of “Europe’s conflict”, even though its economy was largely unscathed by war. As such, Bretton Woods was US-dominated and produced a settlement largely on US terms. Seventy years ago this...

Paul Craig Roberts: The entire U.S. gold hoard is now goneFormer U.S. Treasury official Dr. Paul Craig Roberts told King World News the entire United States gold hoard, including gold supposedly held at the Fed for other countries, is now gone. This is very bad news for Germany and other countries which have trusted the Fed to safely store their gold. Excerpts from the interview: Eric King: Dr. Roberts, I know you’ve seen the report on Bloomberg about Germany supposedly being happy with storing their gold at the New York Fed. It seemed to be a propaganda piece. What was...

We are now in a situation where every major economy in the world is in a total mess.” Greyerz goes on to explain, “Japan’s economy is going to disappear into the Pacific. China is having its problems. Europe has problems. The EU will never work and was not supposed to work. The euro is an artificial currency and, in the long run, will not survive. The U.S. stock market is at an all-time high, but that has nothing to do with the real economy which is an absolute mess. So, the world has never been in a situation where all...

Back in 2013, Williams predicted that it would be “game over” in 2014. What are the statistics showing him now? Williams says, “They are showing the economy continues to weaken, and it never recovered. A second quarter contraction here would most assuredly be recognized as a new recession, and I contend we never got out of the old recession. We had plunge, stagnation and, now, we are turning down anew.”