With gold and silver near recent lows and the US Dollar having broken key support at 78.50, the Godfather of newsletter writers Richard Russell had this warning for his subscribers, ?Remember, many leading nations want to eliminate the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. If this happens, it will be one of the worst financial catastrophes in US history.?
Russell continues:
?Please study the daily chart (above). This is the US Dollar Index. Today there’s no definition for the dollar. So how do we price the dollar? At one time, the dollar was priced in terms of the time-honored standards — gold and silver. But today we must price the dollar against other fiat currencies. “A dollar is worth so much against the yuan, or so much against the pound sterling, or against the euro and so forth.”
Thus we have the Dollar Index, an index that pits the dollar against six other fiat currencies. To get back to the chart, we see that the Dollar Index is now trading below its blue 50-day moving average. The 50-day, in turn, is below the red 200-day MA. Thus, the Dollar is in the classic bearish configuration as long as it trades below its 50-day MA.
Note also that the Dollar has now broken below three preceding lows, a bearish situation.
Furthermore, MACD has turned bearish, pushing the blue histograms into negative territory (bottom of the chart).
The real news, the critically important news, centers around the US dollar. It’s as if you are reading a report on a building you want to buy. The report tells you all about the heating system, the repairs to the roof, the condition of the wood floors, but the report leaves out the critical fact that the foundation of the house is crumbling.
So it’s the dollar, the dollar, the dollar, that I’m directing my subscribers’ attention to. If the dollar collapses, every investment you own will be adversely affected — your home, your stocks, your insurance policies, your bonds, your 401K — everything that is denominated in dollars.
The Russell advice — swap your dollars for physical gold or CEF, GLD, or SGOL. In other words, do as China and Russia and many other nation are now doing — get out of your dollar assets.
…I realize that what I’ve written above may seem outlandish to many subscribers. Outlandish? Then you tell me how the US is going to finance a national debt of $13.9 trillion (some say the real debt is over $50 trillion). The fact is that we now BORROW just to pay the interest on the national debt. Treasury is moving the debt to ever-shorter maturities, hoping that the current zero interest rates on short debt will ease the situation. But with bonds sinking, rates are now rising, so what’s the answer?
The answer is that we’re eating ourselves up alive through compounding interest on our debt.
There’s only one way out that I can think of. The dollar amount of our national debt stays the same. But the item that we pay the debt off with — is variable, and I mean the dollar. Thus, our government hopes to pay off the carrying charges of the debt with cheaper dollars — MUCH cheaper dollars.?
Art Cashin in one of his King World News interviews pointed out that he was watching critical support on the dollar index at 78.5. That level was violated recently and the index is around 78 today. Now Russell is issuing a warning. It will be interesting to see if another leg down develops and where that will take the dollar.