Goodbye Dollar, Hello Yuan

You know what’s it like, the driver stands there in front of the car that has just hit you up the back while looking at something happening down the street rather than checking on you hitting your breaks…and yet, he says “sorry, but you stopped too quickly, it wasn’t my bad driving”. Why is it that people just refuse to admit the truth even where it comes up and slaps them in the face? It’s exactly the same with the Death of the Dollar. Denial is the first stage in the mourning process that people go through when they have lost a loved one. Yes, just the mere fact that there is many an American out there who is actually denying this means that the Dollar is lying feet up on its back, six feet under already today. They are simply, in denying the fact, espousing the 7 stages of bereavement. The Dollar is dead. Today it’s Australia that will be sending flowers to the Americans.

ASX, the Australian Stock-Exchange operator and the Bank of China announced today that they are going to provide a Yuan settlement service between the two countries by the end of the first half-year 2014. China represents the biggest trading partner for the Australian market and trading in Dollars has no sense today. Transactions have been increasingly made in Yuan rather than the Dollar over the past few years. This new agreement comes just after last October’s agreement between the Eurozone and China and the currency-swap deal.

For all of those out there that will be screaming from the rooftops that China is slowing down, that the economy is under-performing (incidentally, they are still performing way better than any of us in the western world) the Chinese currency is one of the top traded currencies today in the world, and Australia has just said they don’t care if the economy is slowing down. The reason why the deal has been struck is because they are looking at China in the long-term view.

Since September 2013, the Yuan has been in the top ten of tradable currencies, according to research carried out by the Bank of International Settlements. The Yuan saw a jump from 17th position in 2010 to 9th place in 2013. There may be a slow-down in the economy and there may be problems with the structural reforms undertaken by the government, but in the long-term the Yuan will be traded more and more. The Australians are proving that today.

The financial market reforms have been centered on liberalization of the capital account and the convertibility of the Yuan. The only countries that offer complete convertibility at the moment are the USA, Japan and Australia.

Certainly the shadow-banking problems are far from over. There will be more that come out of the woodwork in the coming weeks. It is estimated that 40% of the 10 trillion Yuan in trust products that are used in shadow banking will mature in 2014. That means that we could be in for a lot more examples of the $126 million-worth of products issued by Jilin Province Trust that defaulted on the repayment to investors over the past couple of weeks after having made loans to the failing coal company Shanxi Liansheng Energy (at the same time as 6 other trusts also made loans of up to 5 billion Yuan to this company that was already bankrupt and dead). 80%of trust-product principal is going to be repaid to investors between 2014 and 2016. That could spell trouble.

Bailing out trust investors continually will bring about problems of financial stability of the country. But, in the long-term there is the belief that the Yuan will succeed. All of that is true, but the Dollar may well be dead completely, and buried, before the Yuan fails.
In the process of acceptance of bereavement, the next stage after denial will be anger. Then the US will enter the period of bargaining with the rest of the world to try to save its place somehow on the international scene. Once it has been through the penultimate stage of depression (oh, no! Not again!), it will finally accept. But, for the moment, they shall just keep on denying lock, stock and barrel. The rest of the world, like the Australians, are seeing to it that the Dollar dies a quicker death than it would perhaps have normally done.

Remember it’s not the value of the Dollar that is important or whether or not the Yuan can be a valued asset in the world to trade with, it’s the perception that we, as consumers and countries, actually have of that currency. The Australians are showing that the Yuan has just been perceived as possibly of greater value than the Dollar.

Tissue to dry your eyes?