United Liberty

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner may not want to think out loud like this:

The dollar fell briefly on Wednesday after Tim Geithner, the Treasury secretary, appeared to suggest that the US was open to exploring a Chinese proposal to reduce reliance on the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Mr Geithner told the Council for Foreign Relations that he had not studied the proposal by Zhou Xiaochuan, Chinese central bank governor, for greater use of special drawing rights – a synthetic currency maintained by the International Monetary Fund that represents a basket of actual currencies – in global reserves, but added: “We are quite open to that.”

He said increased use of SDRs should be thought of as an “evolutionary” step rather than a step towards “global monetary union”.

The dollar fell 1.3 per cent against the euro as headlines saying “Geithner open to SDR currency” flashed across traders’ screens. With the currency falling, Mr Geithner’s interviewer – Roger Altman, a deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration – gave Mr Geithner the chance to clarify.

The Treasury secretary said: “I think the dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve currency.” The dollar subsequently recovered much of its losses.

Geithner’s open-mindedness is cause for concern. Both China and Russia have floated this idea. Calls for a global currency will only get louder, especially when inflation from our spending spree sets in.