Today, the chorus line of the debt ceiling and dollar bears is "all fall down." The missing issue of this President election is monetary policy -- America's need for a stable dollar. But massive Federal Reserve credit expansion, QE1 and QE2, has forced the volatile dollar down to such a depreciated level on the foreign exchanges that, absent QE3, a reversal of trend should appear with rising interest rates by the upcoming Presidential election.
Even more confusion pervades the public controversy over the future of the world dollar standard and its alternative -- the true gold standard. The international debate focuses on the longevity of the dollar as the world's official reserve currency. The debate stems from two, recent, contradictory events. On the one hand, an unstable dollar, caused by the Federal Reserve credit contraction of 2005-2007, led to the deflation of 2007-2009. On the other hand, the steady rise of the gold price -- also caused by the subsequent Fed expansion of QE1 and QE2 -- has signaled the threat of inflation. The painful economic consequences of alternating deflation and inflation have refocused the historic American monetary debate. Americans must choose between paper money and gold. The choice will be either: (1) floating paper currencies mixed with pegged exchange rates for key currencies -- such as a fixed link between the paper dollar and the paper Euro; or (2) on the other hand, a non-national, neutral American monetary standard such as gold, i.e. a dollar defined in statute by a stable, fixed weight of gold.
To choose the gold standard and a stable dollar entails an American self-denying ordinance by which to reject the privilege and the burden of the official reserve currency role of the dollar. To choose floating paper currencies with a pegged dollar-Euro exchange means continued systemic inflation and deflation, caused by unconstrained Federal Reserve and foreign central bank manipulation of the official dollar reserve system.
Dollar instability has engendered a near-universal loss of confidence in the world dollar standard. But there is no equally liquid currency alternative for national reserves. Two generations of collapsing pegged exchange rates and unhinged floating currencies have turned trust in official dollar reserves into mistrust and contempt, not least because dollar volatility and near-zero interest rates primarily benefit the subsidized bankers and Wall Street speculators. It is their lobby that welcomes near zero interest rates and the profit-making volatility of speculative markets -- the very same volatility that deranges sound, long-term business planning and destroys the savings of working families.
A world standard of monetary measurement that is extremely unstable is no trustworthy standard at all. Take an example from uniform weights and measures, such as the yardstick, which is defined everywhere as 36". All contracts made according to such a standard of measure are based on the agreed definition of the yardstick and thus rely on the stability of the standard. No government agency, no person, has the authority to manipulate the yardstick and to manage it toward 33" tomorrow, 39" next year. The economic consequences of such arbitrary volatility would be enough to deconstruct all industries that depend on a stable standard of measure. Floating exchange rates are like floating yardsticks. Floating exchange rates abruptly distort entire national economies, radically repricing in world trade the value of national labor and national factors of production, thereby forestalling investment and inducing intermittent inflation and deflation -- boom, panic, recession, and unemployment.
Given the instability of the dollar, the once-trusted measuring rod of value in world trade, a single question should dominate the present monetary debates: Does a dollar convertible to gold at a fixed price, i.e., a dollar defined in law as a weight unit of gold, rule out systemic inflation and deflation better than the Fed manipulated, inconvertible paper and credit-based dollar of today? The answer to this question, given the historical evidence, is yes. (See Table I and discussion below.) Can any proposed further pegging of key currencies produce anything but more pegged currency financial crises of the kind we have experienced in the past? These crises include the 1971 collapse of the Bretton Woods dollar exchange rates pegged to European currencies, followed by a decade of stagflation; the collapse of pegged European currency exchange rates before the onset of the Euro in 1999; the near total collapse in 1996-2000 of pegged dollar exchange rates in Asia, along with the collapse of the Asian economies and other emerging economies. Moreover, the pegged undervalued Chinese-American exchange rate has helped to deindustrialize America and to encourage mercantilism -- generating inflation in both countries. These are but four profound examples of the consequences of floating and pegged currency exchange rates that still orbit unpredictably around the unstable world dollar standard.
Ultimately, America will choose either dollar convertibility to gold at a fixed price, or continue with the Fed run paper-credit dollar that has lost 80% of its purchasing power since 1970 (see Graph I)
