Currency wars: where will it end?

The current financial crisis put a huge question mark on the credibility of the major currencies. The rounds of massive quantitative easing - printing of trillions of dollars - of unpredictable consequences, major banks balance sheets crisis, sovereign debt crisis and so on. In the midst of it the economic prospects of the US and the EU still look gloom as there is no apparent revival trend that would lead to a sustainable growth. All the governments are doing looks like life support of the dead corpse of the financial system rather trying to stimulate the economy. No wonder, as the financial system was turned into a giant pyramid scheme it keeps on collapsing. And it will keep on collapsing until the pyramid is liquidated. The currencies such as the US dollar, Euro, the British Pound are in fact such a pyramid scheme vouchers.

The recently proclaimed currency wars underpinned by the current US initiative of quantitative easing, kind of a major fiscal offence, are likely to result in further undermining of the major currencies. In fact it is likely to further undermine the world financial system as we know it which is based on fiat money where currencies represent the credibility and financial worthiness of economies they represent. As currencies are used so crudely as financial weapons their credibility as a value store will soon be gone. So what next?

There are economies and businesses in the world that generate profit. They need to store value in a credible way. If the major currencies lose such a role the natural way will be a come back to a barter-type economy. Buying commodities, land, etc. and trading it. It looks likely it will go in this direction but the system will be managed in far more refined manner rather than a typical barter of a gone by age. The obvious candidates would be virtual currencies. Each of which would represent a basket of commodities agreed by parties to a transaction. The obligation to pay a bearer would not be in any currency but in a basket of commodities. However, one can expect, that typically a payment would be accepted by a receiving party in some currency - or currencies - equivalent at the time when it is settled. Technically there is no limit to a number of such currencies: a new one may be created for the purpose of a new transaction. However one can reasonably expect a good degree of standardisation, i.e. a major 3 - 5 virtual currencies, commodity baskets. This would facilitate trading between them and trading between the contracts based on them. In fact China's massive multibillion dollars commodities-for-cash deals are good early examples that such a system is already emerging.

Virtual currencies would be inflation immune within the commodities they represent. They would be durable and non-perishable as they will not be actual commodities but rights to get them on demand when a contract representing a particular currency is settled (i.e. value is exchanged). Such model should be quite appealing to countries like China and India whose development depends to a large degree on the access to commodities. It should also be appealing to commodities producing and trading countries as they would not be dependant on a very uncertain fate of the US dollar (a major, by far, current commodity trading currency). And as a value store, virtual currencies would always store a real value despite the fact that there would always be a risk of a commodity going up or down against the others. After all, this might not be such a big revolution: ultimately it may lead to re-basing the national currencies, turing a full circle from abandoning de-based and worthless paper money and going through a modern form of bartering. This time round not strictly currency based on gold but on various commodities baskets. However there could be a lot of bumps, or worse, along the way.