REVIEW:
Jim Sinclair: The central banks will buy the government debt. That’s called quantitative easing.
HRN: Doesn’t QE undermine the dollar?
Jim Sinclair: The dollar is an exercise in psychology. It’s a piece of paper with a promise to pay but there’s nothing in which it can be paid. It’s legal settlement for debt but there’s nothing that it’s convertible into. To maintain confidence, it’s necessary to maintain the stature of a currency. In an arithmetic sense, if you go into a market to sell a supply of apples, and if you’re the only seller, you can get a nice price. If more sellers, meaning more apples, come into the market, there goes the price of apples. QE creates more dollars, which increases the supply.
HRN: If QE doesn’t stop soon, what will happen?
Jim Sinclair: The end game is a virtual reserve currency linked to gold. It will be based on an average of major currencies, which will slow down the movement in the index. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is moving in that direction with Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). The dollar will be just another currency. The dollar’s not going to zero. It could loose a significant part of its buying power, which it already has and could again.
HRN: How would a virtual currency work?
Jim Sinclair: There would have to be a broad measure of the money supply, such as M3 used to be for the U.S. dollar, but on an international basis. The price of gold would be related to that measure. Central banks would have to value their gold according to their contribution to or extraction of international liquidity, so the price of gold would rise or fall on its own.
HRN: Wouldn’t that be a gold standard?
Jim Sinclair:
There’ll never be a return to a gold standard in my opinion. The end of all hyperinflations has been a commodity currency. That’s exactly what happened in Germany, for example. Gold has the capacity to give confidence to people if there’s some relationship between the currency and gold. The virtual currency will be linked to gold but not convertible into gold.
HRN: So, a gold component will restore confidence?
Jim Sinclair:
The answer is a commodity currency. That’s what happened every time there was this type of situation in monetary history. The rentenmark, which ended the German hyperinflation in 1923, was supposedly backed by all the real estate in Germany, but the government didn’t own that real estate. The point is that it wasn’t true. There was no great commodity backing for the rentenmark, but it was enough. It was a period when people were searching for anything to restore confidence in the currency.
Over the counter (OTC) derivatives are the reason we are going through what we are going through now. An OTC derivative is a kind of wager on what something will do. Up until 2009, most of these wagers had very little, if any, money behind them and, if the direction you bet on didn’t come to...