what would happen?  Does that mean our bank accounts go to zero and our cash is useless?  What about all the home and car loans, or credit card debt?  Or will they just base it off another currency and divvy up the difference and everyone will just drive on from there?  

U.S. Energy costs will skyrocket as oil will no longer be traded in FRN's

This



 

Most of the dollar's value is derived from the need to trade in dollars.

When thats gone, and since dollars are not scarce...





 

What are they going to use? Yen?  I don't think so

The Euro... Where have you been for the last five years?

When China repossesses the U.S. they'll push for the Yuan.

Rinminbi.

All of China's US dollar holdings become worthless and they lose billions upon billions.

Nobody is "dumping" the dollar.

Thanks for that  


As opposed to the billions that they were/are prepared to spend, and lose in trade, when we 'go to war' over Taiwan?





They're not working on nuke versions of the Exocet to use on our carriers as a philosophical thought experiment.





 

Inflation , mostly. If there are suddenly a lot more dollars in circulation they will buy less. The loans you have won't change, unless the lender demands that you pay them off.
 That is my limited understanding of it.

Agreed.

The "promise", as it were, is that the U.S. has a policy (so far) not to renege on it's obligations for repayments to creditors or holders of U.S. currency.  The Chinese have been mentioned previously, but Japan follows in a strong second of holding U.S. securities.  Currently, our monetary policy is not the best interest to our nation as the risk of inflation looms, and the Fed will likely tighten-up it's current policy.  It's unlikely that other nations will soon abandon the U.S. dollar for another preferred international currency.  

In fact, the cheaper dollar now makes overseas investments in the U.S. an attractive investment opportunity.

Certainly, there are some issues of concern to our creditor nations, as well as immediate concerns to Americans.  The increasing deficit coupled with national policies of National Health Insurance and Cap and Trade legislation will become an exorbitant burden upon taxpayers.  With a retrospective view of how the social welfare economies of France, Germany and the U.K., to name a few have diminished their global stance will bear strongly on our nations ability to remain a significant player on the world stage.

Woohoo! I'm finally "ready" for something!





 

You'll be able to buy anything made in America. Just add a zero to the price.

Jet Lee would unpeg it and shove it up Mel Gibson's ass...



 

"They" are not going to be dumping the dollar.

Nice




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The Euro has 10x the chance of breaking up than supplanting the dollar....

Most of the Dollar hate of late has come from the Church of Gold, and their almost comical tunnelvision on the dollar.

Given the amount of dollar threads there are here lately, and the arfcom contrarian indicator, I would not be surprised if the dollar was just about to make a major upward move...

It amazes me that no one else can put two and two together that China is talking the dollar down so that they can stealthily devalue their own currency and boost off more growth for it's export-overdependent economy... Not out of some super duper secr3t conspiracy to destroy th3 dollar....

i loled...

Since that little practical joke we pulled last year called the "Near collapse of the global financial system", many countries have expressed an interest in moving away from using the dollar as the de facto global currency.
There have been proposals put into place to switch to a "basket of currencies", versus a "new global currency".
The earliest timeline for this is ten years.
WHEN it happens (and it is silly to think that it will not eventually happen a year or ten or one hundred or a thousand years from now), our interest rates will be higher and prices will go up, especially foreign goods and imported commodities.  Not the end of the world. We would likely perceive it as inflation.   If the process occurs quickly, it could be more painful and perceptible that if it CONTINUES to happen slowly.  (The dollar has already lost 30% over the last ten or so years.)
That being said, it is imprudent to not hedge against this possibility, in my opinion.


 

Ya know, if China could boost the dollar to twice its current value, they wouldn't have to devalue their own currency at all.
 

No, WAY too many uncertainties with the Euro.



 

The holdings in USDs would be hurt.   World wide depression.

Hell, I'm depressed now.  And all my money is invested in debt as it is.  






 

Let me take a wild assed guess.....you don't teach economics.
The dollar has lost 17% of its purchasing power against floating currencies over the past 12 months.  Whether it is because people are "dumping" the dollar or it is because they just don't want it as much as they did before is pretty much the same thing.
That has affected everyone of us in what we are able to purchase with what we make or with what we have saved.
 

And getting less and less scarce, .....think an economy worse than Argentina's.

Yeah, well maybe if you earn dollars and spend Euros for some strange reason.  Otherwise the impact is on a macro level.

The dollar will not be "dumped".....that would be too hard on the world economy.
However that statement does not preclude other countries from planning and executing
a coordinated effort to replace the dollar over time.

If the dollar is replaced life in America will suck on a scale far grander than it does now
for far more people.   But it will not happen without plenty of warning.

Unfortunately we import most of what we use........It kind of effects all of that.



Even though oil is purchased in dollars.......have you noticed it has gone up in price this year.....even though demand is way down???  



 

It means a world-wide economic meltdown....



The USD would lose significant value, but in doing so would wipe out the 'producer economies' who depend on US consumption to live...



Mutually Assured Monetary Destruction....



 

on the other hand, a weak dollar makes it more expensive for US companies to offshore work, so more jobs stay here.

and, a weak dollar makes it less expensive for foreigners to buy American made products –– like steel, wheat, cars, airplanes, computers, software, and so on –– increasing exports.

you speak of a weak dollar as only a bad thing.  in fact, the weak US dollar has the foreigners propping up the stock market in a big way right now.  the US stock market has NEVER been cheaper, in Euro terms, than it is right now.  no wonder the money is pouring in from abroad.

back up to 2001 when the dollar was incredibly strong and every US company was busy offshoring jobs to China, India, and Pakistan.  aren't you and your coworkers glad that trend has stopped and even reversed direction?

two sides to this coin, there is.

http://www.forecast-chart.com/exchange-euro.html

ar-jedi

this is precisely why i bought a wood burning stove...
however my source of free wood might disappear if demand for wood skyrockets.

China is beginning to understand that their holdings are already worthless. They do not have to "dump" the dollar - they will simply stop accruing more holdings in dollars.

Think of it like a bank. You loan a bunch of money to an individual. You book the payback as future profit. After awhile the person you lent the money to goes bankrupt - you know you will never get paid. You write off the debt he owes to you as a loss and do not lend more money to that individual.

That's ok. You will still be able to burn cash.

Picture of Weimar Republic bank personnel burning cash:

that's how it works with an individual.  
that's not how it works when the numbers get really big.

if you owe the bank $200K and you can't pay, then you have a problem.
if you owe the bank $200M, and you can't pay, then the bank has a problem.

now multiply that by 1000 again and you start to see the magnitude of the china "bank" problem.

ar-jedi

No. Typically, Americans like to believe that and at one time that was true. It is no longer so. There's plenty of trade between other countries and to the exclusion of us.

We're more of a burden than a benefit to producer economies. More and more, they're selling to each other. Especially the BRIC countries.

Dollars are exceptionally scarce... those numbers in the internet ether on your bank account are not.  There is a dramatic difference.

There is no profit to be had trading from a stable low value currency to a stable high value currency or vice versa.

The only profit to be had is trading between currencies whose relative values are changing.

The US dollar is poorly managed, while the US worker still has enough incentive left to work harder, per capita, than most other populations.

You work to increase your quality of life, which has the side effect of increasing the dollar's value.

Your neglected money managers use trickery to kill the value of the dollars you own, creating a constantly declining value currency, and creating the opportunity for profits to be made trading against the US dollar.

The dollar will never go to zero in value, unless you allow the government to change to a different currency, to further cover the swindle they have perpetrated against you for decades now,  or else we are militarily overrun, see "Confederate Dollar" for reference.

However the US dollar WILL continue to decline in value as long as there is value to be traded away, and as long as you are more interested in professional sports than you are interested in the burglars in your wallet.

If and when most of the value of the US dollar has been liquidated to the point a critical number of US civilians stop working and go on the public dole, or the black market outside US dollars dwarfs the US dollar denominated economy, the money traders will seek out another prey and the value of the US dollar will stabalize at low levels, in the long term. See, Russia, Mexico, and to some extent in the 1990',s Japan.

They "depend on US consumption to live"....................





Oh man, oh man my sides are hurting. Is that the same way that we "depend" on welfare recipients to use up our extra resources? Or is that more like the way we "depend" on complex financial derivatives like CDOs to wring invisible profit from unprofitable home loans to people who can't afford their mortgages?


Money is a store of value, or should be at least. When the USD loses value, and it is begining to right now, people don’t want it. EVERYBODY dumps it. Including holders of the dollar in the United States. This is common sense, or should be at least. If and soon when inflation kicks in and we get annual inflation rates of 10%+ people spend those dollars and dump them into the economy, because if they don’t they get nothing. Depending on what the inflation rate actually is, the rate goes up. If the inflation rate is 200% an hour, you damn well better spend every cent you have as soon as possible, because by tomorrow you are going to have dollars, but not dollars that can buy anything.
Everyone everywhere WILL dump their dollars if there are too many dollars in circulation. Dump doesn’t mean throw them in the garbage, or burn them in a stove. It means redeem them for goods and services. If everyone spends all of their money in a situation where the total of goods and services remains the same, the prices go up because the value of the dollar goes down. That is what dumping means, that the dollar approaches zero. Sure, it will never actually reach zero – just approach it. As in if you held a dollar from 1920 it would be worth maybe 6-7 cents right now, in terms of actual goods and services. All of your dollars from 2000, are worth $0.81 now. Who cares if everybody is a millionaire if a million bucks buys a candy bar. The important part is, really the only part of a dollar is the value. And when foreign countries start spending theirs – the value will go down.
What does it mean about debt? It means that debt pays. If you borrow a million dollars that would have bought half a million gallons of milk, and repay it with a million dollars 5 years from now that buy only ten thousand gallons of milk you come out way ahead depending on the interest rate that you pay.
A lot of it is going to depend on what the US government does. If they manage (haha) to negate all of this debt overhang without inducing massive inflation things might work out just fine. If they don’t work fast enough we could have disastrous deflation (very, very unlikely). So most likely, we have inflation (dollar dumping) coming up, and probably coming up soon.

While the anti-USD folks tend to insist on that, the sheer magnitude of consumption by the US vice other economies says otherwise....



And the people of the 3rd world don't have the money to make up for it...



Trying to paint politically motivated but economically suicidal decisions by the 'New Left' of S America, and the Russians trying to act relevant as a 'trend' is only something one would do if their failing agenda needed 'support'...
 

1) No one but a moron uses money as a store of value. It is a medium of exchange which is to be used to immediately obtain somthing else...





2) The USD until the 1970s was artificially pegged to gold (which naturally rises in value due to population growth & scientific advancement raising demand)...





So comparisons of the government-price-controlled dollar to the free-floating dollar are inaccurate...





3) Due to your 'money should be a store of value' post, the rest of your post can be discredited....
 

Money shouldn’t serve as a store of value? And, “the producer economies” should just sit and keep on hoarding those dollars because otherwise we would have “Mutually Assured Monetary Destruction....”
I don’t know why I am even bothering. Statement #1: “the dollar is a store of value and should be endlessly accumulated by producer economies, if they spend their dollars they would destroy the value of a dollar and themselves”.  Statement #2: “the dollar is only meant to be used as a medium of exchange immediately, and no one should hold any dollars as they do not store value”.
Money that doesn’t serve as a store of value doesn’t last very long, and is soon replaced. See Angola, Argentina, Austria, Belarus, Bolivia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Japan, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romaina, Russian Federation, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, United States, Yugoslavia, Zaire, Zimbabwe……and others. Most of these replaced their currency. Some ended up in civil disaster that lead to war, civil or with other countries. That was the entire point, that the dollar may be on its way out. With ignorant attitudes of “that just won’t happen” it is plenty likely.

THIS!! FTW!!!!

Reguardless of what happens (You can still trade your Good running 11 year old Pickup Truck for 4 cords of dry aged oak firewood.