CHAPTER 11

Endgame—Paper, Gold or Chaos?

“I just want to make it clear to everybody that our policy has been and will always be . . . that a strong dollar is in our interest as a country, and we will never embrace a strategy of trying to weaken our currency to gain economic advantage at the expense of our trading partners.”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, April 26, 2011

“No, they cannot touch me for coining, I am the king himself.”

William Shakespeare, King Lear

Few economists or policy makers at the IMF or global central banks would subscribe to the complexity-based, money-as-energy model outlined in the previous chapter. Although the physics and behavioral science are well founded, mainstream economists do not greet interdisciplinary approaches warmly. Central bankers do not have a sudden dollar collapse in their models. Yet mainstream economists and central bankers alike are well aware of dollar weakness and the risks to international monetary stability from the new currency wars. Taking a range of views from the conventional to the cutting- edge, we can foresee four outcomes in prospect for the dollar—call them The Four Horsemen of the Dollar Apocalypse. In order of disruptive potential from smallest to greatest, they are: multiple reserve currencies, special drawing rights, gold and chaos.

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