I subscribe to Jim Rickards’ monthly newsletter Strategic Intelligence. As a subscriber, I also receive daily emails from Jim on various topics.
Yesterday’s email contained a link to an article by two economists in which they advocate for replacing all the world’s reserve currencies with a crypto-SDR.
I will post a copy-and-paste of a portion of Jim Rickards’ email, in which he introduces the article, with apologies in advance to Jim if my quoting is a bit more than “fair use”. And then I will link to the article.
Get Ready for Crypto SDRs. The Dollar’s Death Will Happen on Blockchain
Jim Rickards’ Strategic Intelligence, March 7, 2018
We’ve written many times in the past about SDRs. That’s an acronym for special drawing rights, issued by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). SDRs are not hard to understand. They’re just world money printed up by the IMF as needed and handed out to their member countries as a reserve asset and source of liquidity. SDRs have been around since 1969. There are about $300 billion equivalent in SDRs outstanding. The last issuance by the IMF was in August 2009 at the tail end of the global financial crisis. SDRs are the most likely candidate to replace the dollar as the leading reserve currency in the course of the next financial crisis. Gold would be a better reserve asset, but central bankers and the IMF dislike gold because they can’t print it to conduct bailouts of their elite cronies, so they will try SDRs first. I’ve also written a lot about cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Readers are familiar with my view that bitcoin is a technological dead end, although some other cryptos with better use cases will survive. The one technological breakthrough that is sure to survive is the blockchain itself, or what is now called “distributed ledger technology” (DLT). This article describes a mash-up between SDRs and the blockchain. The author begins with familiar arguments that the dollar is an obsolete reserve asset that should be replaced by the SDR. Then he breaks new ground by proposing that the IMF and private sector should work together to create a blockchain and protocol to support the “e-SDR,” or the cryptocurrency version of an SDR. With increased issuance by the IMF and improved usability through the blockchain, the SDR could quickly become an inexpensive and easy-to-use world money substitute for dollars. The death of the dollar could happen much faster than most believe.