Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Tag: Dollar Hegemony

Another Word On Treasury Bonds

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On August 20, 2026

55 Comments

Treasury bonds are auctioned by the Treasury department. It is an auction: banks say what rates they will accept, the ones who offer the lowest rate get the bonds. You can agree to buy bonds without bidding, in which case you just get whatever rate the auction sets.

So Treasury does not set the rates and say “take it or leave it.”

The rates for short term bonds are close to the Federal Reserve rate, longer term bonds can diverge a lot based on how much banks think the future is dangerous. After all if you’re locked in for five, ten or twenty years, and bond interest rates go up, you just took a bath relatively speaking. And since they probably went up because inflation went up, you could wind up with less real money than you started with. With short term bonds you can take a loss, but you aren’t stuck with it.

This is the primary market. The secondary market is FAR larger and is people selling bonds that already exist to each other. If interest rates go up, the price of existing bonds goes down, and vice-versa.

The largest holders of Treasury bonds outside of the US are Japan, China and the EU. If they sell a lot of bonds (and Japan is considering it) then for the usual reasons, the price will go down on bonds and that means interest rates need to rise in the next auction. If I can get bonds for cheaper, I’m not going to buy them off the primary market or from primary dealers.

Now there are banks who are required to buy bonds. First there are primary dealers, 25 of them: they have to bid. But they aren’t required to take the interest rates Treasury wants taken. As a rule they’ll try to be close to what Treasury wants, being a Primary Dealer is valuable, but they aren’t going to cut their throats.

The secondary market effectively determines the minimum interest rate that Primary Dealers can accept, because if they accepted less they’d be buying bonds worth less than bonds on the secondary market. They’re not going to eat billions of dollars of losses.

Next we have the fact that all US banks are essentially required to hold Treasuries as part of their liquidity requirements. Most assets count for liquidity, but only some assets are counted at 100%. Treasuries count, because the idea is that the Feds can always print money and therefore you are always sure to at least get your interest payments. The federal government cannot go bankrupt, so long as the US debt is denominated in dollars.

BUT as prices for bonds drop, which remember happens in inverse to interest rates on new bonds and also drop if there’s much more selling than buying on the secondary market, the value of the bonds that all these banks hold as their reserve requirement also drops.

So if Treasuries become a lot cheaper the banks suddenly can’t, en-masse, and for no fault of their own (this time) meet their liquidity requirements. And then you have a potential banking crisis.

Yes, the Fed could then step in and pull some arguably illegal shenanigans. But that has its own downsides. The bottom line is that if the world suddenly doesn’t want as many Treasuries as the debt and interest payments requires, the US has a real problem.

Go back to “as long as US debt is denominated in dollars”. A lot of counries can’t borrow in their own currency, or can’t borrow all the money they need. So they issue bonds denominated in other currencies, usually the US dollar.

If there isn’t enough demand for US bonds, then suddenly the US is in the same position. Bear in mind, even if I want exposure to the US, do I want it in Treasuries? After all, it’s the stock market that’s been super juicied, and if I think inflation is going to go up significantly, why buy Treasuries now? Why not wait?

But this where the rest of the current clusterfuck comes in. There’s every reason to believe that inflation will go up. A barrel of diesel is now selling for around $180 dollars. The Iran mess shows no end in sight. AI looks like a circle jerk bubble.

What happens if AI is a bubble and bursts at the same time as all this is going on?

Well that tanks the stock market. Suddenly foreigners want a lot less US dollars, since they don’t want as many US bonds or stocks.

If this happens, the US dollar starts falling. All assets owned in US dollars become worth less to everyone, foreigners and domestic, since the US dollar can buy less (remember, net importer.)

What we have right now is a perfect storm: the AI bubble, treasury bond problems, the Bank of Japan needing to sell treasuries to prop up the Yen, the Iran war. The US isn’t intervening to help Japan with the Yen out of the goodness of their own hearts, most of these people would sell their own kids into sex slavery if it’d help them get ahead. They’re doing so because if they don’t help Japan, Japan will help itself by selling potentially hundreds of billions of Treasuries in a short time.

If you’ve been following, you know that means that bond prices will drop and interest rates on new issues will have to go up and banks will become insolvent. It also will mean that a lot of other people will sell because they’ll get hit by margin calls as the value of their portfolio drops precipitously.

This is a real problem. It is not fake. And because it is a few problems: the Iran war, the carry trade, the AI bubble all at the same time, it’s very hard to manage.

If Trump had a lick of sense or wasn’t being blackmailed by Israel (or whatever the reason is) he’d end the damn war tomorrow and give Iran what is needed, because keeping the war going is risking the entire ball of wax.

Once the US loses dollar hegemony, it won’t get it back because most of the world hates it and Russia/China and others have been working hard to create SWIFT alternatives. Likewise if the US loses dollar hegemony most of the West can expect a huge hit to standards of living.

Dollar hegemony could have continued for another twenty years if the US had played nice with China and Russia, not abused sanctions, and not started stupid wars. Moving off has real costs and if the price of staying on wasn’t high, countries would have just gone along with it. But the US made unnecessary enemies and fucked around, and now it’s going to find out. If not during this crisis conflux, then the next, and there will be a next.

 

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Russian Debt Default + Consequences, Simply Explained

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On March 16, 2022

21 Comments

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, but the fundamentals are worth a quick review.

Russia had hundreds of billions of dollars on reserve at central banks. We have frozen them so they can’t spend them, and we’ve also forbidden banks, in general, to do almost any business with them in dollars.

So they have the money to avoid default, but are not allowed to use it to pay their debts.

This is like if you personally had an account at the bank for $10 million and they said, “We’ve frozen it so you can’t spend it, and we won’t accept money from anywhere else, but we still expect you to pay your mortgage.”

It’s obviously unfair, and everyone outside of the West knows it, as many countries have invaded other countries and none of them were hit this way. This punishment is so harsh because Russia is outside the club and didn’t have the nod or a similar punishment would have been doled out over Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, among many others.

It has made other countries scared for their money. Even countries that have license, like Saudi Arabia — who is currently bombing the hell out of Yemen with a sanction in sight.

Saudi Arabia is considering accepting the Yuan for oil payments.

Of course, the US is pushing back hard — that oil is priced in dollars, and it’s one of the main reasons the dollar is the global reserve currency.

But while the Sauds are in good for now, who is to say they always will be? What if one day the US decides to sanction them? Perhaps they see it as in their interest to diversify their reserves. Perhaps they also see Beijing as FAR less likely to sanction them? If they do, I agree. Just don’t piss China off about Taiwan, and the odds of China ever freezing your Yuan reserves or sanctioning you is essentially zero, not least because in order to grab reserve status from the US, they need to be more trustworthy.

I don’t know if the Sauds will do this yet; the pressure the US must be bringing is immense. But I do believe that when we look back on these massive sanctions, we will see that forcing Russia into default was the end of the dollar’s hegemony. This weapon has been used before, but only on marginal states. To do it to a Great Power is quite different.

The US can’t be trusted with your money. Before, people was perceived the US was the safest place.

For most countries, the dollar hegemony has been terrible; they sold American stuff and got numbers on a computer in return. (China on the other hand, played the game smart. They got the US industrial base in return and, even if the US freezes every dollar they have, they’ll still be ahead.)

Most countries will be better off in a de-dollarized world. But the US won’t, and if Europe stays a US satrapy (which most indications suggest it will) then it will be bad for them. Ironically, back in the early- to mid-2000s, the Europeans had the opportunity to make the Euro an independent reserve currency, but, as usual for Europe in the age of American dominance, they lacked the guts.

None of this will happen immediately. But I believe we’re either at, or within, a year of when we will be able to look back and see this as the tipping point.

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Why Would Iran Attack Tankers?

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On June 19, 2019

23 Comments

Well, if it did.

Let me tell a story, possibly apocryphal. Back in the 1970s, the Russian (USSR) ambassador supposedly had a talk with the Pakistani leader of the day. This is what he is reputed to have said.

” I do not know who will be in charge in Moscow in ten, twenty, or even 50 years. But what I do know is that whoever is there will want the same things then, that we do today. You can trust us, not because we pretend we are your friends, but because we are consistent.

Anyway, remember, that we’ll come back to it.

In the meantime, on June 13th there were reports that two tankers had been sunk in the Gulf. Claims were made they were sunk by Iran.

I shrugged. Important people want war between Iran and the United States, and in such a situation it’s hard to know what’s true and what’s not. I moved on with my day.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

But yesterday I discovered an interesting fact. Before the two tankers were sunk, something else happened:

On June 5, 2019, a huge fire consumed a storage facility for oil products at the Shahid Rajaee port in the southern Hormozgan Province. Located west of Bandar Abbas, the Shahid Rajaee port is Iran’s largest container shipping port. Reportedly, a vehicle used for transporting shipping containers exploded and caught fire. Since there were oil products near the site of the explosion, the blaze spread quickly to several tanks and storage sites and caused heavy damage to the port. The spreading fire set off huge explosions which shot fireballs and heavy smoke high into the air.

On June 7, 2019, six Iranian merchant ships were set ablaze almost simultaneously in two Persian Gulf ports.

First, five ships “caught fire” in the port of Nakhl Taghi in the Asaluyeh region of the Bushehr Province. Three of these ships were completely burned and the two others suffered major damage. Several port workers and sailors were injured. As well, at least one cargo ship burst into flames and burned completely at the port of Bualhir, near Delvar. The fire was attributed to “incendiary devices” of “unknown origin.” The local authorities in the Bushehr Province called the fires a “suspicious event” and went no further.

Oh hey.

So, assuming the Iranians did attack the ships, they were retaliating.

Iran has long said that if they can’t get their oil to customers, no one will get oil to customers through the Gulf.

Yeah.

But this has bigger consequences. The real problem is simpler: The US made a deal with the Iranians, under Obama, then repudiated it when the President changed.

The US has arrogated to itself the right to impose sanctions on anyone it wants, for any reason, with no recourse by the victim. It is using this “right” in an attempt to remove Iran’s government.

The US cannot be trusted. Every few years, it changes. You can’t make a deal and be sure it will be honored for any length of time, let alone 10, 20, or 50 years.

Americans who squeal about Trump being an aberration both miss the point (your system allowed him) and are wrong: Bush attacked Iraq based on lies, and everyone knows it. Hilary Clinton promised the Russians that Qaddafi would not be removed, then removed him and gloated about him being killed after being raped by a knife.

The US can’t be trusted.

So the larger consequence is that a coalition of countries, including multiple oil producers, China and Russia are moving to sell and buy oil in a bundle of currencies which does not include the US dollar, and where no payments go through the payment system which the US can control (systems like SWIFT, to slightly oversimplify).

Dollar hegemony is one of the main supports of American hegemony. Misuse of dollar hegemony to attack other countries has brought us to this point.

I’ve been a bit of a broken record on this issue, but that’s because it’s been the obvious consequence of the US Treasury’s misuse of its powers.

Other great powers and their allies can put up with a cruel, even an evil, hegemon. What they will not put up with is a capricious one whom they cannot predict.

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