This event will premiere on this page at 12:00 p.m. EDT, Thursday, October 15.
Brendan Brown, drawing on themes from his just published dialogue book co-authored with Philippe Simonnot, “Europe’s Century of Crises under Dollar Hegemony” (Palgrave Macmillan), discusses how the degradation of the U.S. monetary regime in the wake of the pandemic will influence Europe. The discussion will be moderated by Stephen Martus, founding partner of Macro Hedge Advisors LLP.
Brown hypothesizes that the outcome will be Germany exiting the present monetary union and forming a new one including itself and its small neighbors. This would be the third time since the U.S. emerged as the global monetary hegemon in 1920 that this unleashed in turn a German monetary shock to Europe – the two previous episodes including the German bubble and bust in the mid-late 1920s and then the birth of the hard Deutsche mark in the 1970s.
This new monetary union in Europe would be very different from the first – based on principles of sound money. The success of this “European mark” could in turn lead to a re-building of sound money forces in the U.S., so enfeebled in successive decades since Paul Volcker led the retreat from monetarism and collaborated with James Baker’s devaluation of the dollar in 1985-7. The realization could eventually dawn in Washington that the U.S. has much to gain from re-building US monetary hegemony based on a sound dollar and that the supposed gains from inflationary dollar hegemony have been illusory, never mind the soundbites of past Treasury Secretaries, including “the dollar is our currency but your problem”.
