International Reserves in the world’s central banks have declined from $12.032 Trillion dollars, the peak reached on August 2, 2014, to $10.814 Trillion dollars on January 13 this year, as registered by Bloomberg. This is a decline of about 10.12%.
Over the past 29 months, the decline in Reserves took place at a rate of about $42 billion dollars a month. At this rate, by the end of 2017 International Reserves will likely decline by another $504 billion dollars, to $10.31 Trillion, which will increase the decline from the peak in 2014 to 14.31%.
However, the rate of decline is almost certainly going to increase, because the spring that has fed International Reserves since 1971 – the US Trade Deficit – is the object of the attention of Mr. Donald Trump, and he has expressed the intention of stopping up this spring by reducing or eliminating the US Trade Deficit, which feeds International Reserves to central banks of the rest of the world.
The decline in the total of International Reserves is a clear sign of world credit contraction. The economic consequence to a world that has been built upon the premise of ever-expanding credit will be the increasingly desperate liquidation of investments by businesses and individuals around the rest of the world, in order to pay off previously incurred dollar-denominated debts. The liquidation will be a huge struggle against the opposing current of increasing scarcity of dollars.
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Thus I am led to believe that 2017 will be a year of economic chaos for the world; the contraction of credit in the world in 2017 will manifest itself in the form of bankruptcies at all levels, destruction of financial assets, collapsing prices, massive unemployment, currency devaluations left and right, and of course, world-wide political instability.
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