Thursday, April 9, 2009

To print or not to print

I can't stop enjoying the mess that US is going into. I mentioned in one of my previous posts that US has lost pretty much all of its manufacturing infrastructure. The services sector, too, has been outsourcing to India. This all adds up to bulging trade deficit. In a layman's term, the payments exceed receipts.
Whoever, trades with US, expects to be compensated in USD, which is not worth the paper it is printed upon. At least not any more. The argument of unlimited taxing power of the US congress is not valid anymore since the US government started using the Tax payers' money for corporate bailouts. Moreover, the monetary and banking system of the US is a chaos. Which brings us to question the credibility and stability USD based settlement system.
China, KSA and Russia, having large trade surpluses, hold major portions of their reserves in USD denominated assets. They are in just as big a mess as the US. Should the Fed start printing more greenbacks, financial institutions around the globe will be flushed with USD liquidity and USD will lose value.
Here is the most interesting part. Pakistan and other emerging market economies running trade deficits, stand to gain from this turmoil. In our case, the amount of reserves that we hold in USD assets are close to USD 8 billion (I need to verify this figure). On the other, our liabilities in USD are mush more than that. So when comes the time to repay, USD would be much less than PKR 80. Doesn't that make you feel good?
This is what a lot pf people would call "wishful thinking". And I won't disagree.

2 comments:

  1. well loss for some, gain for others :) i dont mind seeing all of em in mess at all

    ReplyDelete