Major Economic Warning Sign: The Euro Is Heading For Parity With The U.S. Dollar
By Michael Snyder
TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com
December 15th, 2016
The collapse of the euro is accelerating, and it looks like we could be staring a major European financial crisis right in the face early in 2017. On Thursday, the EUR/USD fell all the way to $1.0366 at one point before rebounding slightly. That represents the lowest that the euro has been relative to the U.S. dollar since January 2003. Ever since 2011, I have been relentlessly warning that the euro is heading for parity with the U.S. dollar. When the EUR/USD was trading at about $1.40 that must have seemed like crazy talk, but I never wavered. I just kept warning people that the euro was going to weaken greatly relative to the U.S. dollar. Here is one example from March 2015: “How many times have I said it? The euro is heading to all-time lows. It is going to go to parity with the U.S. dollar, and then it is eventually going to go below parity.” After Thursday, we are almost there, and once we do hit parity that is going to be a sign that all sorts of chaos is about to erupt in Europe.
For years, so many people that write about our coming economic problems have been proclaiming that the death of the U.S. dollar is imminent.
But I have always taken a different approach. I have always maintained that the collapse of the euro comes first, and that the death of the U.S. dollar happens some time later.
So many people have wanted to get rid of all of their dollars in anticipation of the coming crisis, but that is a huge mistake.
First of all, without exception everyone needs an emergency fund that can cover at least six months of expenses in case there is a job loss, a health emergency or all hell breaks loose for some reason.
Secondly, cash is going to be king during the initial stages of the coming crisis. Later on the U.S. dollar will rapidly lose value, but at first it will pay to have significant amounts of cash available to you.
Most people out there seem to think that a strong dollar is great news and that it is a sign of good things to come under Donald Trump.
But the truth is that an overly strong U.S. dollar is actually very bad news for the global economy.
For the U.S., a strong dollar hurts our imports and tends to drag down our GDP.
For the rest of the world, a strong dollar makes it more expensive to borrow money. The economic boom in the developing world following the last financial crisis was fueled by mountains of cheap dollars that were borrowed at ultra-low interest rates. But now the U.S. dollar is surging and interest rates are spiking, and that is starting to cause major problems.
It now takes much more local currency to pay back those dollar-denominated loans that were made in emerging markets during the boom times. If the U.S. dollar continues to rise we are going to see a staggering number of defaults, and a credit crunch in many areas of the globe seems inevitable at this point.
Of course the big thing to keep an eye on over the coming weeks is the rapidly unfolding crisis in Italy. The Italians have the 8th largest economy on the entire planet, and we are in the process of watching their entire banking system completely implode.
The Rest…HERE
