Hacker News Books

Aftermath is an excelent book on the subject if you are interested in more. Sections on WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and Gulf War 1.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55545.Aftermath

James Rikard (author of Currency Wars) in his newest book Aftermath predicts that the dollar's reserve currency run may soon be over, and special drawing rights (SDR) reserve currency might only be 1/3 dollars. I think he is probably correct on this prediction but maybe not on another prediction: currencies like China's and Russia's might soon be 20% backed by gold. He makes the point that there is no need for 100% backing from gold since a smaller percentage would still prevent a country from printing new currency out of thin air.

I think the dollar has a lot of inertia so it might reign for a long while longer as reserve currency, but then I also think about how much debt we have. Our treasury can not account for $21 trillion (ref: Catherine Austin Fitts http://solari.com) and the amount of consumer, educational, real estate, etc. of debt worries me, but: I expect a slow burn of our economy, not falling off of a cliff, economically speaking.

We can adjust to a decade long slow downward economic trajectory, people are resilient.

Thanks, you triggered an interesting thought: is the U.K. really likely to be an adversary of China? Based on reading James Rickard’s Aftermath and also Gaft Luft’s and Anne Klein’s De-Dollarization, I can list out how different the UK’s and the USA’s situations are re: China:

China and Russia (with many smaller countries who are growing more resentful of the advantage we get having the dollar as the world reserve currency) are actively trying to undermine the dollar (let’s hope they fail, or that it takes a long time!) but they probably view the U.K. as a trading partner and as much as possible be cordial with.

England is done with being the world mono polar superpower so they don’t show up strategically as a real adversary.

For financial and ego reasons, the USA is trying to hold on to its status (although by over using tariffs and sanctions, we are being incredibly clumsy - we need to get our act together!)