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(Italic text emphasis added.)A reserve-currency issuer should play an outsize role in global trade, which encourages partners to draw up contracts in its currency. A historical role as a global creditor helps to expand use of the currency and encourage its accumulation in reserves. A history of monetary stability matters, too, as do deep and open financial markets. America exhibits these attributes less than it used to. Its share of global output and trade has fallen, and today China is the world’s leading exporter. America long ago ceased to be a net creditor to the rest of the world—its net international investment position is deeply negative. Soaring public debt and dysfunctional government sow doubt in corners of the financial world that the dollar is a smart long-run bet.
Challengers have for decades failed to knock the greenback from its perch. Part of the explanation is surely that America is not as weak relative to its rivals as often assumed. American politics are dysfunctional, but an often-fractious euro area and authoritarian China inspire still less confidence. The euro’s members and China are saddled with their own debt problems and potential crisis points. The euro has faced several existential crises in its short life, and China’s financial system is far more closed and opaque than the rich-world norm.
The global role of the dollar does not depend on America’s export prowess and creditworthiness alone, but is bound up in the geopolitical order it has built. Its greatest threat is not the appeal of the euro or yuan, but America’s flagging commitment to the alliances and institutions that fostered peace and globalization for more than 70 years. Though still unlikely, a collapse in this order looks ever less far-fetched. Even before the pandemic, President Donald Trump’s economic nationalism had undercut openness and alienated allies. Covid-19 has further strained global co-operation. The IMF thinks world trade could fall by 12% this year.
Though America’s economic role in the world has diminished a little, it is still exceptional. An American-led reconstruction of global trade could secure the dollar’s dominance for years to come. A more fractious and hostile world, instead, could spell the end of the dollar’s privileged position—and of much else besides.
In 2011, then-President Barack Obama attended an intimate dinner in Silicon Valley. At one point, he turned to the man on his left. What would it take, Obama asked Steve Jobs, for Apple to manufacture its iPhones in the United States instead of China? Jobs was unequivocal: “Those jobs aren’t coming back.” Jobs’s prognostication has become almost an article of faith among policymakers and corporate leaders throughout the United States. Yet China’s recent weaponization of supply chains and information networks exposes the grave dangers of the American deindustrialization that Jobs accepted as inevitable.
Since March alone, China has threatened to withhold medical equipment from the United States and Europe during the coronavirus pandemic; launched the biggest cyberattack against Australia in the country’s history; hacked U.S. firms to acquire secrets related to the coronavirus vaccine; and engaged in massive disinformation campaigns on a global scale. China even hacked the Vatican. These incidents reflect the power China wields through its control of supply chains and information hardware. They show the peril of ceding control of vast swaths of the world’s manufacturing to a regime that builds at home, and exports abroad, a model of governance that is fundamentally in conflict with American values and democracies everywhere. And they pale in comparison to what China will have the capacity to do as its confrontation with the United States sharpens.
In this new cold war, a deindustrialized United States is a disarmed United States—a country that is precariously vulnerable to coercion, espionage, and foreign interference. Preserving American preeminence will require reconstituting a national manufacturing arrangement that is both safe and reliable—particularly in critical high-tech sectors. If the United States is to secure its supply chains and information networks against Chinese attacks, it needs to reindustrialize. The question today is not whether America’s manufacturing jobs can return, but whether America can afford not to bring them back.
The United States’ industrial overdependence on China poses two profound national security threats. The first is about access to the supply of critical goods.
The second risk of U.S. industrial dependence on China is about the integrity of powerful dual-use commercial technology products: civilian goods such as information platforms, social network technology, facial recognition systems, cellphones, and computers that also have powerful military or intelligence implications.
The United States’ slow drift toward deindustrialization is not a threat to Democrats or a threat to Republicans—it’s a threat to the United States. Addressing it will require an American solution that transcends party lines. It will require an extensive collaborative effort between the government and private sector to take inventory of the products salient to national security—determining which high-tech and vital goods must be produced domestically, which can safely be sourced from allies and friendly democracies, and which can still be imported from the global market, including from authoritarian states like China. Carrying out this strategy and operationalizing it will take time and substantial resources.
Reconstituting America’s domestic production capacity will be contingent on procuring a reliable, abundant supply of key natural resources at a low cost, building up a large talent pool of skilled industrial workers, and making substantial investments in fostering hotbeds of innovation.
Full disclosure: I have a small position in MCSMX.For starters, the goal of reopening factories won’t be economically sustainable if the United States can’t ensure cost-effective access to natural resources and raw materials those factories need to produce finished, manufactured products. China has made acquiring premium access to resources such as zinc, cobalt, and titanium a national priority. By making investments and loans worth hundreds of billions of dollars across the developing world—particularly in Africa—it has established a model of trading technology and infrastructure for resources. In one such case, China struck a deal with a Congolese mining consortium, Sicomines, to secure access to critical minerals for electronics like copper and cobalt in exchange for investing in essential infrastructure projects like hospitals and highways.
To compete, the United States and its allies will need to play a shrewd game of macroeconomic chess, offering their own funding for infrastructure and development, but without the predatory debt-trap qualities that often accompany Chinese funding. Many African countries have interlocked their economic futures with China because they see little alternative—if Chinese loans once came with few strings attached, they now often require adherence to a variety of CCP norms. Last month, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee offered one idea: an International Digital Infrastructure Corporation that would offer these countries the financial incentive and support to buy and install American-made hardware. Providing that alternative—assistance and financing that authentically empower recipient governments and benefit the local population—could shift the economic orientations of nations that would prefer to be less entwined with an expansionist authoritarian power. It could also serve as a powerful tool to supply U.S. and allied manufacturers with critical raw materials needed for the production of strategic hardware.
https://morningstar.com/articles/998348/the-great-asset-bubbleIn 32 years, I have never believed a word about U.S. government officials creating an “asset bubble.”....This column is not to second-guess emergency decisions (by central bankers). It is instead to confront the prospect that for the first time during my investment experience, the wolf of asset-price inflation has arrived. At some point, if enough liquidity is created through central-bank actions and deficit spending, those funds will push asset prices higher than they otherwise would be. That time would seem to be now.
Which leaves me with little advice to offer, this being new territory. One obvious concern is portfolio diversification. If rapid money creation can cause all assets to rise at once, then presumably the opposite policy might lead all assets to fall at the same time. That would be disheartening. It would also seem to be an implicit recommendation to hold more cash, and thus fewer risky assets.
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I agree but the solution should never be only Government it should be a combo of Gov+the private sector developing programs for jobs that are needed in the work place.@davfor Yes. This all seems probable. Which just makes it more important to implement programs that will assist those who have been displaced to transition to a new place in a changed post-covid world.
Nope, guards will be in demand (we are seeing it already "defund the police") and will have plenty of jobs.
@Old_Joe Crow while you can. Just remember in the back of your mind that those people who won't find new jobs, and won't be able to rent, and will barely be able to eat are the same people who have all of those automatic pistols and rifles. And those are also the same people that you will need to hire to protect you in your guarded, fenced enclave. Good luck on that. Matter of time
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/owners-equivalent-rent-and-rent.pdfHousing units are not in the CPI market basket. Like most other economic series, the CPI views housing units as capital (or investment) goods and not as consumption items. Spending to purchase and improve houses and other housing units is investment and not consumption. Shelter, the service the housing units provide, is the relevant consumption item for the CPI. The cost of shelter for renter-occupied housing is rent. For an owner-occupied unit, the cost of shelter is the implicit rent that owner occupants would have to pay if they were renting their homes.
2 completely different funds.actually this is giving me confidence in the fund. It's got more than half in cash, a heckuva bond mgr, and it's giving you 4.4%. This might be the "new" RPHYX
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