Executive Summary

• Other currencies are inflating faster than the USD
• The USD is still backed by a preponderance of the world's assets
• The potential for a global currency crisis is rising
• Why USD will be the (initial) safe haven when it arrives

If you have not yet read Part 1: How Much Higher Can The U.S. Dollar Go?, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part 1, we reviewed the technical evidence in support of a second move higher in a multi-year U.S. dollar rally. Here in Part 2, we ask: What conditions might drive such a move higher?

To answer this question, let’s start with another question: What’s scarce in the world of foreign exchange (FX)?

We ask this because capital, profits and gains flow to what’s scarce and in demand. This boils down to supply and demand: gains go to whatever is in high demand and scarce, and whatever is not in demand and over-supplied will lose value.

Supply and Demand

Like every other commodity, currencies respond to supply and demand: whatever currency is scarce and in demand will rise, while currencies that are in oversupply and not in demand will decline.

Though many presume the world is awash in dollars as a result of Federal Reserve quantitative easing, the reality is that expansion of USD via bank loans (credit) and Fed money-creation is modest compared to the expansion of other global currencies such as China’s renminbi (RMB), a.k.a. yuan.

Consider this chart of bank credit expansion in the U.S. and in China since the onset of the “Great Recovery” in early 2009: China’s bank credit has soared by 260%, a sum that is roughly 140% of China’s entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while U.S. bank credit rose by a modest 12% of U.S. GDP.

If we compare M2 money supply, we find...

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