华尔街周谈：AI时代互联网、太空港投资与玻利维亚投资前景

[music] This is Wall Street Week. I'm David [music] Weston bringing you stories of capitalism coming to an internet near you. Artificial intelligence. Will those helpful chat bots kill the search and advertising paying for all that content that you enjoy? and liftoff of Falcon 9.

Plus, the race to make money in space. Companies are competing to launch 100,000 satellites in the next 5 years as China builds out its own space infrastructure in Latin America. And investing in Bolivia, a new regime aims to be friendly to private enterprise. But when is the right time for investors to dip their toe in the water? But we begin with the continuing conflict in Iran. Harvard professor and former IMF chief economist Ken Rogoff chronicled the US dollar's rise in the beginning of its decline as a global currency [music] in his latest book, Our Dollar, Your Problem.

It turns out that it's not just oil and aluminum at risk in the Iran war. It also may be the status of the [music] dollar. Ken, in your book, Our Dollar, Your Problem, you talk about the position of the US dollar as declining gradually over time in relation to other currencies. We now have a conflict in Iran. Is that affecting that decline? Oh,

I don't think there's any question that it will affect the decline. It could go either way. It depends on how it comes out. If the US comes out incredibly triumphant, there's peace in the Middle East. uh everyone, you know, looks to the United States to maintain peace. That's one outcome. Another outcome where where it's viewed as a strategic defeat and China gains. But, you know, it's it's a step. I don't think either way it's changing a dynamic that was going to happen anyway.

There are things on the outside that it influences. So they're it's definitely going to help China accelerate getting other countries to use its currency particularly for Chinese imports. For example, if China buys oil or China buys anything, it's going to help in that dimension. Uh but it's also affecting global debt because everybody sees a lot of need for military expending. The US is the biggest debtor in the world.

We lose the most when global interest rates go up. So there are pressures from the outside coming from everybody's trying to look for other options and pressures from the inside that we're you know running this big debt that is manageable if we wanted to but there's not a lot of will to want to

is the strength of a currency reflective of the strength including military strength of the country in your book you graduate to the Armada actually with Queen Elizabeth I and the Spanish as Is this potentially a barometer of how the world is perceiving the relative military strength of the United States?

The military strength's a piece of being the dominant currency. And here, just to be clear, we're talking about the dollar's market share, which reached an incredible peak about 10 years ago. But also, military strength gives you the ability to affect negotiations. They can be over very unrelated things. They can have to do with how the IMF works. they can have to do with how global banking regulation works. So having the military power at the end of the day says well you know of course of course it matters for a lot of things and if you're looked at as weaker it hurts you and part of the protection historically going back to like 1974 was of the Gulf states countries like Saudi Arabia because of US military protection.

Now, as you say, it depends on how this all plays out. But if in fact the United States does not uh have a triumph of some sort over Iran, does it really undermine the confidence of the Gulf States in using the US dollar?

Well, the Gulf States are a really important anchor of the US dollar. And you know, it's interesting you picked the 1970s because it really fell in the 1970s. Europe left the dollar. That's worth remembering. And the Gulf States when they sort of did their recycling of their petro dollars through the United States and priced oil and dollars, I think it was sort of helpful. Although nevertheless, you know, that period uh was down.

I don't want to overstate the petro dollar. I want to be a little careful about that because oil is a very flexible price. We're all staring at Brent crude and it's still here and it goes here. it can move very fast. So it's a little bit like my paying with Visa or Mastercard. It matters a lot more whether uh goods manufactured goods are priced in dollars. But it but it's important. I mean it fills a lot of roles. The Gulf States use dollars.

Saudi is still pegged to the dollar. I don't know how long that's going to last but they still are. And because uh so many of them uh are pegged to the dollar, rotate around the dollar, they hold more dollars. They've been very important to our business model. Not as important as China, but they've been important. And it's unclear how this is playing out. I mean, I think a lot of the Gulf States are looking at us and saying, "Wait, I thought you built those bases to protect us.

I didn't know you built those uh you know uh various military complexes in our country so we could be target practice and are you on our side or you on their side like what's going on? That's been a delicate dance. I I don't think we know how it comes out yet. So, you know, China's kind of playing it cool. A lot of people say they may benefit. They might, but but I I just think we have to see what the endgame of this is. the Chinese might benefit.

Will will the yuan benefit? Because we see Iran saying, "We'll let oil through the straight moves if you if you sell it in yuan, for example." And China certainly wants more transactions denominated.

They're doing quite a bit in crypto, too, also, by the way. Yeah. I mean, if they get paid in dollars, we can sanction them immediately. They're putting it hostage. Why the heck should they do that? That's certainly significant. But the big thing of the Iran war in the future of the dollar is it's raised global interest rates. They were going up and up and up. So if I look at the dynamic of how I see things unfolding, it's that there's this pressures from the outside that are very slowm moving but they're happening to have a more multipolar system.

And there are problems on the inside where we're the richest country ever, ever, ever. But we still have trouble paying our bills and running these crazy large debts. There's no political consensus in either party. The Republicans don't want to tax anyone. The Democrats think 1% of people can pay, which doesn't add up. And so we are racing towards having a fiscal problem. And then central bank independence becomes a problem because when you have a fiscal problem you're kind of looking for the central bank to bail you out and if all that's happening that's sort of what happened in the 70s in a way it undermines the dollar.

So so what are the metrics that people should use in figuring out where we are in the relative prominence of the dollars? What do you look at? I mean for example were you surprised that the dollar was not more of a safe harbor when the Iran conflict broke out? So uh there are people in finance uh who are doing all these papers showing that the premium we used to extract on longer term debt is gone. So on short-term debt there's still a premium to dollars.

It's still the safest asset. Long-term debt it's not there anymore. I mean it's safer than let's say uh you know some African or South American countries debt but if you compare it to many European countries uh Japan it doesn't rank that way they used to and so there are ways in which what we're getting out of the deal is going down. Now we can crowd everything into short-term borrowing and Secretary Bessence said I think interest rates are going to go down.

I'm going to borrow more short-term. Okay. But that's very risky. In fact, I think he was saying not to do that 10 years ago. And so we're losing you you see that in many

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