Monday, November 05, 2007

U.S. Dollar Flight Continuing

More and more people are bearish on the U.S. dollar. I have of course long recommended people to stay away from it, and so have many other people, including Jim Rogers, one of the world's most successful investors. He put the matter well in his recent Financial Times interview when explaining why he is selling all his U.S. assets:

"The U.S. dollar is a terribly flawed currency...I don't want to own a currency which is being debased that way. The central bank of America has said that it will print as much money as it need to drive down the value of the currency...it doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is a currency that will be going down for some time to come. The head of the central bank has been printing money since he got there for two years ago. He is printing money very rapidly now, especially since this summer. This is a man who spent his whole career studying the printing of money, now America has given him the printing presses. I don't want to be in a currency like that. He[Bernanke]'s gonna print money until he runs out of trees. I don't wanna own U.S. dollars in an environment like that. I don't know why anybody would."

Now, even models start to reject the U.S. dollar too. Gisele Bündchen, a Brazilian model of German ancestry, has now said she will no longer accept payments in U.S. dollars and instead wants to be paid in euros.

Personally, I don't think euros is the best alternative given how bad the ECB have been doing in recent months. Gold would be the best, but among paper currencies, swiss francs, swedish kronor, chinese yuan and japanese yen are the most attractive currencies to receive payments in as they are either the most undervalued and/or the least debased.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

whilst i can understand not keeping large quantities of cash in usd, why would you sell all your us assets? isn't the current us asset boom just the mirror image of the currency debasement? as for supermodels knocking back usd payments (why would'nt you just swap into the currency of your choice?), perhaps this is a contrary indicator. the newsletters are so full of usd bear pieces. perhaps the supermodel of 2007 is the taxi-driver of 1987, or the shoe-shine boy of 1929.

4:03 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

whilst i can understand not keeping large quantities of cash in usd, why would you sell all your us assets? isn't the current us asset boom just the mirror image of the currency debasement? as for supermodels knocking back knocking back usd payments (why would'nt you just swap into the currency of your choice?), perhaps this is a contrary indicator. the newsletters are so full of usd bear pieces. perhaps the supermodel of 2007 is the taxi-driver of 1987, or the shoe-shine boy of 1929.

4:53 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Verry good!
I have been recomending SEK since 1993 and even staying out of the Swiss franc.
CHF has the same exchange rate it had ten years ago and a much lower interest rate.

Göran, Sweden

8:38 AM  

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