THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR THE DOLLAR 191The SDR sounds geeky — it stands for Special Drawing
Right. The name is by design. Global financial leaders pick
strange names for what they’re doing so people don’t under-
stand what it is.
Luckily, the SDR isn’t complicated. It’s very simple. The
Fed has a printing press and can print dollars. The European
Central Bank has a printing press and can print Euros. The
IMF, the International Monetary Fund, has a printing press and
can print Special Drawing Rights. The SDR is simply world
money. They didn’t want to call it world money because that
sounds a little scary, but that’s what it is.
They’re not new; in fact, they’ve been around since 1969.
The IMF can print them and in the next liquidity crisis, they
will do so. In 2009, they printed hundreds of billions of dollars
equivalent of SDRs. Not very many people noticed.
They’ll be involved in a bigger way when the next crisis
hits and we could see the SDR become the new global reserve
currency. That doesn’t mean the dollar goes away. It just means
the dollar would be a local currency like a Mexican Peso or a
Turkish Lira. We will have them for getting a taxicab or going
out for drinks, but it won’t be used for the big things.
When I say the big things, I mean the price of oil, the settle-
ment or balance of payments between countries, probably the
financial statements of the hundred or so largest corporations
in the world. In the future, maybe you’ll get your annual report
from IBM or Volkswagen or General Electric and it’ll be in SDRs.
■ Societal Collapse
The fourth scenario is simply collapse, as in, societal collapse.
You’d see civilization falling apart.
You might see the president using executive orders to imple-
ment neofascist policies. Look at your local police force. When I
was kid, cops would walk the beat and get kittens out of trees.