Currency Crisis

Every King has a succession, or his dynasty is overthrown. And every dog has its day. There is a time for everything. The ascend of paper money has been the wind that propelled the sail of trade in circumnavigating the globe. But now, the junks have turned into Triple E class container ships, and relying on wind sails is beyond impractical. The velocity, volume, and complexity of modern trade, exacerbated by human greed, impunity of corporations, and corrupt governments, has steered the world towards financial chaos more than once. The burden of government instated currencies have fallen on the shoulders of the majority over and over again. Currently, the crash of the Iranian rial, the Venezuelan bolivar, the Turkish lira, the Argentine peso, the Brazilian real, the Indian rupee hitting a record low to the dollar, and the Indonesian EM currency infection dragging its rupiah towards a three year low to the dollar, are stirring up faith in the global finance reign of the greenback. And, causing a question of faith in fiat money altogether. Major geopolitical power houses, Russia and China, have been dumping the US dollar and acquiring gold. Venezuela is experimenting with its petroleum backed cryptocurrency, the Petro. BRICS is initiating its wiggle out of the US dollar trade system, and its members have bought into the Venezuelan Petro, perhaps just to put a check on Trump America. The word is out! Citing for an article from Forbes.com, cryptocurrencies are popping everywhere; Tunisia, Senegal, Sweden, Estonia, China, Russia, Japan, Israel, Dubai, Switzerland, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, Ireland. The term digital currency will be defined along with digital scarcity. Check out what a “Cryptocat” is to get a virtual taste of the how massive and far reaching the digital wave/tsunami really is. Currency has to be backed by something, intrinsically like the properties and scarcity of the precious metals themselves, or extrinsically with something even as vague as trust in a government aka credit. Something that has a limit supply of. As a precious property, cryptocurrencies provide unprecedented traceability with blockchain technology, but that requires cooperation on a global scale as well. As for scarcity, it’s the same deal with any fiat currency actually. Instead of printing them out or wiring them up, crypto coins are basically unique computer codes. Precious metals like gold and silver was what started it all. Tampering with that to create quantity has led to overspending and collapsed economies since ancient Athens, and the Roman empire. The devaluation of the Roman dinar perhaps being the first specimen of hyperinflation. According to Providentmetals.com: “In 301 AD, a pound of gold was worth 50,000 denarii. By the middle of the century, the price of gold had increased about 42,000 times, making currency worthless.” Ancient china pioneered fiat currency during the Tang dynasty with paper receipts that would be reimbursed to coinage, facilitating high volume trade and security. The Song Dynasty’s Jiaozi was the world’s first paper money, but its use was limited to localities and had expiration dates to eligibility as legal tender. Then during the Yuan dynasty established by Kublai Khan, overspending to finance wars cause the world’s first fiat/paper money hyperinflation through unrestricted printing of paper money that had no duration limit as legal tender. Printed money becomes worthless paper with elaborated prints when there seems to be a limitless supply of it. We can’t do much with paper, especially paper that is already printed on. Money as a representation to the allocation of limited resources has to have a limited amount in circulation. We eat other living things for food. We still burn fuel for thermal and kinetic energy. We make smartphones and computers from materials that we know we have a finite amount of on earth. Even services, everyone who’s worked in hospitality knows there’s a limit to how many mechanical smiles a person can muster out in a day. The repercussions of the decision to save the banking and financial institution that were “too big to fail” during the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis that led to the global financial crisis is still reverberating its havoc. However, the decision, or the structure that necessitated the decision, perhaps has its lineage traced back to the “Nixon Shock” in 1971. And then of course, that incident has a lineage that goes back to the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, when the world was proposed with the made in USA global monetary system, that was then backed by the gold accumulated from the America’s recent WW2 profiteering. After realizing that the numbers from the banks’ binge on “speculation generated wealth” was like taken heroine, they decided to create money to stimulate the economy. Which is like shooting up on meth instead, and has created a false sense of power and superiority, and thus, delusional entitlement to being “Great Again”. Advocating human rights with international laws is awesome. Having the courage to intervene where peoples’ are oppressed is greatness. But, claiming to protect human rights and entering armed conflicts in the name of the oppressed to secure economic power and superiority is evil. Our so called “global trade” has brought prosperity to many, but it has also incurred so much suffering when it’s driven by greed, and justified by hubris. When a King fails his people by oppressing them just to secure his throne, that’s when chaos and revolution comes a knockin. America has to either urgently consolidate a justifiable economic reign in human history, or it must realize that it had its chance in time and let go. Sanctioning governments just leads to governments passing on the burden and pain to people who are just trying to live their lives as happy as they can with whatever they happen to have. Maybe China, as in the People’s Republic of China, should succeed the throne for its manufacturing clout, and steer the fiat money monetary system next. Or maybe, it’s time to call it quits from the “New World Order” of the post WW2 globalization attempt with centralized banking, and experiment in an interconnected crypto world with decentralized multipolarity. However, with any true revolution, and with such radical change on a global scale, there will be losses. Hopefully, not all out chaos.