Amity Shlaes Quotes

Hegemony of the dollar.

Were we to find ourselves in a world in which there was a very significant amount of dollarization, … it would be in the political interests of certain parties in other countries whose policies were less than perfect …, to blame us as the root of their problem.

The major material advantage, financial advantage from having a reserve currency is that between 200 and 300 billion dollar bills, that may be twenty, fifty, hundred dollar bills as well as ones, exist in the world - a lot of them in Russia as you all know I'm sure.

I don't want to see the dollar strong because the rest of the world is crumbling. I would like to see the dollar strong because the Fed has said it wants it to be strong in the future.

The problem started before World War I. The gold standard was working fairly well. But it broke down because of the war and what happened in the 1920s. And then the U.S. started to become so dominant in the world, with the dollar becoming the central currency after the 1930s, the whole world economy shifted.

The 200 years when Britain and the US were the top two economies were an aberration and that will change. The decline of empires has happened much faster than folks think. I believe that gold will be a far better bet in 20 years than the dollar.

The U.S. currency has been the most attractive currency to be in for very, very long periods of time.

In 1971, the U.S. 'closed the gold window,' starting an era of global fiat money reference-pricing that has been unprecedented in history. Never before had the world operated on the basis of no country anywhere having a currency tied to something with intrinsic value like gold.

The most important initiative you could take to improve the world economy would be to stabilize the dollar-euro rate.

If a currency is to become a growing, an increasing reserve currency, there has to be not only a demand for it there has to be a supply of it.

At present, financial crises occur, chiefly because the paper currency is redeemable in gold only.

The United States dollar took another pounding on German, French and British exchanges this morning, hitting the lowest point ever known in West Germany.

There has been talk in Europe about American hegemony being somehow based upon the use of the dollar in the world. I just don't see that connection at all.

If the American government can't stand behind the dollar, the world's benchmark currency, then the global financial system will very likely enter a new era in which there is much less trade and much less economic growth. It would be, by most accounts, the largest self-imposed financial disaster in history.

We believe in fair exchange rates and Japan doesn't practice that. They have massive U.S. dollar reserves, and they use them to intervene regularly.

The most important quality of a currency is its stability.

All Nations endeavor to get the [foreign] Exchange as much as they can on their side.

The currency of any country, whether it be coin or bank-notes, cannot be increased beyond the mercantile wants of that country, without producing a depreciation in the parts which compose the currency.

Manifestly nothing is more vital to our supremacy as a nation and to the beneficent purposes of our Government than a sound and stable currency. Its exposure to degradation should at once arouse to activity the most enlightened statesmanship, and the danger of depreciation in the purchasing power of the wages paid to toil should furnish the strongest incentive to prompt and conservative precaution.

Variableness must ever be the characteristic of a currency of which the precious metals are not the chief ingredient, or which can be expanded or contracted without regard to the principles that regulate the value of those metals as a standard in the general trade of the world.

Until the Fed dumps inflation targeting and the U.S. abandons its weak-dollar policy, inflation will rule the day.

I am concerned about the erraticness of the dollar. The dollar is up, the dollar is down. We print a lot of dollars. The dollar gets devalued. That is really the concern. If people think the gold price up and down is a reflection of something wrong with gold, no - I say it is something wrong with the dollar.

When the dollar is in trouble, that will be one of the alternatives, and the more Bitcoins are used, the worse it will be for the dollar.

The dollar has lost over 90 percent of its value since the Fed was created.

Currency regimes in the past were always destroyed by volatility. So sooner or later, people desire a currency that is stable.