Courtesy of The Pragmatic Capitalist
Never a disappointing read – Russell has never lost site of the big picture despite the rapid short-term gyrations in the market. If you’re not a subscriber of the Dow Theory Newsletters I highly recommend it:
Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
I want to include a few paragraphs from a most important article by the brilliant Niall Ferguson, author of “The Ascent of Money, A Financial History of the world.” Ferguson’s article is about the coming “divorce” between the US and China. I believe the future of the world will revolve around the relationship of US and China. The Ferguson article appeared in Newsweek magazine (Aug. 21) and is entitled, “Chimerica Is Headed For Divorce.” And I quote –
“Let’s look at the numbers. China’s holding of US Treasuries rose to $801.5 billion in May, an increase of 5% from the $763.5 billion in April. Call it $40 billion a month. And let’s imagine the Chinese do that every month through this fiscal year. That would be a credit line to the US government of $480 billion. Given that the total US deficit is forecast to be about $2 trillion, that means the Chinese may finance less than a quarter of total Federal-government borrowing — whereas a few years ago they were financing virtually the whole deficit.
“The trouble is that the Chinese clearly feel they have enough US government bonds. Their great anxiety is that the Obama administration’s very lax fiscal policy, plus the Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing (in laymen’s terms, printing money) are going to cause one of two things to happen: the price of US bonds could fall and/or the purchasing power of the dollar could fall. Either way, the Chinese lose. Their current strategy is to shift their purchases to the short end of the yield curve, buying Treasury bills instead of 10-year bonds. But that doesn’t address the currency risk. In a best-selling book titled Currency Wars, Chinese economist Song
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