Congratulation - World just got New Currency!

At First here is the link to convert your currency to new SDR

YET ANOTHER BIG MOMENT IN HISTORY. THE SDR(Special Drawing Rights at the IMF or International Monetary Fund) is being made convertable into other currencies and the IMF beefing up their ability to service this type of request. If the article is even close to being right, the IMF is looking to increase their ability to leverage by a factor of 15 or more.. Going from gold reserves of 33bln to 283bln is HUGE and should be shouted from the rooftops if true..

In a new article on kitco, analyst Paul Nathan cites a report in Bloomberg that the IMF and representatives from China, Russia and Brazil voted to make the SDR (special drawing right) convertable to any currency. The first reserve of SDR's was created out of nothing at that vote, and is now availble to act as a neutral medium to move international currencies through. Anyone with a large horde of cash can now move it around the world at will, as long as the IMF give the say so. As I see it, this act cocks the gun for a bullet of massive, nation destroying inflation. Here's what Nathan says...

Late on a Friday in August, when most people around the world were not looking, the international monetary system, in an unprecedented move, evolved. We were notified by the IMF of the following:

Aug. 28 (Bloomberg) -- The International Monetary Fund said it today pumped about $250 billion into foreign-exchange reserves worldwide, acting on an April call from leaders of the Group of 20 nations to boost global liquidity.

Countries will be able to convert the money, to come from so-called Special Drawing Rights, into hard currencies through “voluntary trading arrangements” with other members, the IMF said on its Web site today. The SDRs are the institution’s unit of account based on a basket of currencies.

The allocation, approved by the IMF’s board of governors earlier this month, will not increase the fund’s pool of money available for lending, the IMF said. “It will, however, provide members with an additional method to obtain hard currencies.”

Another smaller reserves allocation of about $33 billion will take place Sept. 9 and will be limited to members that joined the lender after 1981, such as countries from the former Soviet bloc, the IMF said.

About $110 billion of the total allocation will go to emerging-market and developing countries and $20 billion to low- income nations.

“A number of members with sufficiently strong external positions” have already said they are ready to set up or expand existing arrangements enabling the sale or purchase of SDR's, the IMF said. The lender typically acts as a broker and arranges transactions between parties at no cost. (End News Release)

What this means is that for the first time in history we have a world central bank capable of creating money out of thin air. No longer does the IMF need to borrow money with a vote of all members plus the consent of the US congress. It can simply create whatever amount of money it needs through the creation of SDRs. Not for itself, mind you, but for the world. The SDR has been around since 1967, but never as a convertible asset. That changed Friday, August 28th, 2009. The SDR has quietly mutated.

The decision was made August 7th, in an IMF vote. According to the IMF "global reserves will increase from just USD33bn to USD283bn or about 4% of global reserves excluding gold. In addition, the IMF will start issuing SDR notes later this year (China, Brazil and Russia will be the main buyers). These SDR notes can be counted as part of currency reserves and hence SDR assets could reach 5% of total reserve assets later in 2009 and possibly surpass GBP, JPY and CHF in importance as reserve assets." This is a foot in the door.

The prospect of this happening was covered in my article, The Making Of An International Monetary Crisis:

"The spectacle of billions of inconvertible dollars frozen in the vaults of central banks has brought on cries of condemnation over the dollar’s credibility as a reserve currency. The Policy Maker’s theory of a stable yet artificially ever-expanding reserve currency has failed.
The "solution" to the problem (if the Policy Maker remains consistent) will be to evolve the international monetary system from a system in which an ever-expanding reserve currency provided the world with credit and liquidity, to a system in which an ever-expanding reserve "asset" will fill that role. Like the dollar, this reserve "asset" will amount to circulating debt, i.e. something owed rather than something owned. It will be a non-market instrument, deriving its acceptability from government cooperation and decree, "immune from the laws of the free market and outside the reach of greedy speculators."

Where will this "asset" come from? Under the Bretton Woods system, dollar reserves were furnished by the U.S. central bank. Both the bank and the "asset" failed to provide sufficient stability. The next step is to create a world bank (a larger bank of last resort) controlled by an international organization (the IMF) with the power to create a new "asset," independent of any single government’s monetary policy.

As a supplement to gold and like the dollar before it, this "asset" should be a credit instrument. Unlike the dollar, it would have the backing of an entire world of central banks. The "asset" should be ever-expanding and should provide both liquidity and stability." That asset is the SDR and the potential became a reality this weekend. (For a further discussion of creating international reserves and the SDR, see my articles The Making Of An International Monetary Crisis and Bretton Woods 1944-1971, under "Other articles" by Paul Nathan).

As of this weekend, the world is 250 billion dollars "richer". No products were produced. No taxes were raised. Not even one cent was borrowed. The IMF simply created a bookkeeping entry on behalf of those countries it felt worthy of receiving additional reserves. The reserves, SDRs, are a claim to "hard currency". The hard currency will be provided by those with "sufficiently strong external positions”, in other words, surplus nations.

There is no reason for surplus nations to part with hard currency, save two, that I can think of: Altruism or Power. And in my opinion they are having a go at the latter. My read on this is that the surplus nations have just made an end run around the United States and the US Congress who have veto power over IMF decisions. Surplus nations can now provide “voluntary trading arrangements” with non-surplus (importing) nations with the IMF as "broker". This sounds like a mechanism for the surplus nations to provide buying power to importing nations at the expense of us all.

The ability to inflate has now been augmented. It has transcended national boundaries from national central banks to a world central bank. This "new" bank now has the power to create money. Inflation is no longer limited to one currency but will affect all paper currencies in the world. We now have the prospect of a synchronized international inflation. It's not enough that citizens throughout the world had to keep a keen eye on their nations central bank, now we all need to keep an eye on the IMF.

The "IMF's Board Of Governors", a group never elected to office, unknown to most, and accountable to no one, has now gained the power to create new claims on production without legal limits or oversight from any regulatory body. All it need do is vote for more SDRs.

Given the "announcement in the dead of night" tactics just employed, I suggest we all sharpen our eyesight. This development doesn't change the inflation outlook for the next month or even for the next year. But make no mistake -- the "powers that be" just took the fiat system and the inflation threat to a new level.

New Banking Strategy - Micro financing vs Too big to fail

Despite the economic downturn, microfinance pioneer Grameen Bank continues to report nearly 100% payback rates for its loans to the very poor.

This bank, started by Nobel Prizer winner Muhammad Yunus, lends to people with zero credit, no collateral, and extremely low levels of income.

Aren't the poorest mass-defaulting due to recent economic hardship? Not at all.

AP: "We have now shown that the poorest of the poor can be creditworthy," he said in an interview with The Associated Press during a recent trip to Bangkok. "Our loan repayments are as high as ever."

One part of Grameen's success is that it involves many members of the same social group when approving and monitoring loans, increasing the social cost of default for the borrower. It also turns many borrowers into shareholders.

A group of five prospective borrowers from similar social and economic positions come together to determine an appropriate loan for each.The request then goes before a larger council of borrowers, who are also shareholders in the bank, and finally to the bank for approval."

Furthermore, the bank focuses on lending for productive assets, rather than for mere consumption or asset speculation. How amazingly obvious this bank's principles sound in retrospect.

Grameen also has been successful because it's grounded in what he calls "the real economy," rather than "fantasy economy" of ever-climbing asset prices. A loan for a goat, for example, produces tangible benefits that can support a family. "The closer you are to the real economy, the safer you are," he said.

While not everything could be scaled-up and applied to large traditional banks -- in doing so, you'd likely lose a lot of what makes this work -- the underlying concepts should be taken to heart.

China aggressively reducing us debt - Sign of things to come

The United States needs to borrow nearly $10 trillion over the next decade, including about $1.6 trillion this year.

Where's it going to come from?

This is critical question, because resistance on the part of creditors will drive up interest rates, clobbering the housing market and demolishing the value of whatever cash savings Americans have left. The other answer--our government lending the money to itself--will destroy the value of the dollar, and that wouldn't help too many people, either (except debtors--it would help debtors because they will be able to repay nominal debts with toilet-paper dollars.

For now, the money we're borrowing is coming from somewhere, thankfully. But it's not coming from China, which has funded our spending for most of the past decade. As you can see in the chart above from the NYT, China's absolute purchases of Treasury debt continued to rise through last year, but the percentage of our borrowing that China is funding is shrinking fast.

Here's Floyd Norris in the NYT:

China reduced its holdings of Treasury securities by $25 billion in June, the most China had ever sold in a month...

China and Hong Kong, which is reported separately but is combined under China in the accompanying graphic, together covered more than half of the increase in the amount of Treasuries sold to the public — that is, to buyers other than United States governme nt agencies like the Federal Reserve or Social Security — in 2006.

That share had fallen to 22 percent last year, when the government increased its public debt by a record $1.2 trillion. In the first half of 2009, China and Hong Kong acquired only 9 percent of the more than $800 billion worth of Treasuries that were sold.