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America's Weak Dollar Policy: "You Can Envision All Sorts of Crises"

Posted Oct 26, 2009 10:07am EDT by Aaron Task in Investing, Recession
Related: UDN, TLT, TBT, GLD, TIP, FXI, PGJ
The Dollar Index hit yet another 14-month low early Monday after a Chinese central bank official urged the PRC to diversify its reserves into more euro and yen. A stronger-than-expected GDP report in South Korea also put pressure on the greenback as traders expect other central banks to follow Australia's lead and raise rates while the Fed stands pat.

"The dollar is a significant concern," says Leo Tilman, president of L.M. Tilman & Co. and author of Financial Darwinism." You can envision all sorts of crises scenarios where rest of the world stops buying U.S. assets because of the dollar [and] you have higher interest rates and all sorts of recessionary pressures."

With the U.S. Treasury set to auction a record $123 billion of notes this week and the Fed's $300 billion Treasury purchase program set to expire, those risks should not be taken lightly. Of course, such concerns have been circulating for a while and have not come to fruition, to date.

It's "very difficult to say" when foreigners stop talking about diversifying away from the dollar and take more concerted action, Tilman admits. But "it's hard to imagine a lot of foreign buyers are going to tolerate further declines in the dollar. "

Tilman, whose firm advises institutions on strategic risk management, says the day of reckoning is likely to come within the next year.

"A lot depends on how sustainable the recovery in the U.S. is: If the Fed has an ability to start hiking IR, that will mitigate some of the pressures on the dollar," he says. "But if we see rest of the world starts hiking rates and the Fed lagging behind because the U.S. economy is so fragile, that will be the breaking point. We're taking the second or third quarter of next year."

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