Even if the dollar was "dead" the time and effort required by the world economy to switch away from the dollar system would be enormous so not much is likely to happen quicker than a few decades.
If you are using the dollar right now, what pain are you taking? None. What's actually happened? US added some tariffs and became a bit more isolationist and the Fed has lost some independence. Might not bode well for the future but has very little impact on today.
People read FUD articles like this then start ignoring any common sense, including even their own senses, because apparently the world must be ending and we're all going to die. There's no pain. What pain is anyone (except a couple dictators under sanctions) feeling?
Almost every major currency has lost value relative to the US Dollar over the past 10 years. Not just, like, a little bit. Like, a lot a bit. The Indian Rupee has lost 53% since 2007. Yen, down. Pound, down. Canada, down. That's reality. There is no "switching to avoid devaluation of the USD" when the USD has devalued so much less than almost any other currency on the planet.
One major country that has managed to maintain the value of their currency relative to the USD is China. Who has by some estimates a ~300%+ debt to GDP load (if you think that number is too high, its because whatever estimates you've read before didn't take into account municipal debt, because that's where China hides it). And a 72 year old leader with zero politically-feasible line of succession. And a critically shrinking population. And literally zero global military force projection. Any faith that any country puts into China is going to be destroyed just a few short years after Xi's death; the main thing China has going for it isn't their manufacturing base, AI strategy, or whatever; its that Xi hopefully won't die in the next decade.
FWIW, my mental CAD/USD price anchor was set when I was coming of age at 0.75 CAD / USD. Today it at 0.73 CAD / USD, and I've seen it touch 0.60 ish and pass parity in my lifetime.
IMO: 30 years isn't relevant to look at, because its ancient history (I'm calling both of us ancient here). It pushes back too far beyond 2008 & the GFC to capture data that isn't relevant to the modern global economy. Everything about everything about the world, today, is a consequence of the GFC, and its likely that by the year 2100 we'll still talk about it as among the most significant things to happen to the world in the past century. Maybe the most significant.
This warrant's a little caution, there may well be some negative selection bias here. The banks most likely to go bust are the ones most desperate for cash so they offer the highest interest rates... If it's FDIC insured you are good up to $250k but I don't know exactly how much inconvenience is associated with your bank going bust and potentially collecting FDIC insurance.
UK rules differ from the US there is a 3-point test for insider trading:
1. The information has to be specific - Yes - you should sell Boeing
2. Would a reasonable investor take this information into account when making a decision to trade - Yes - this seems quite clear
3. The information must be non public - IIRC disclosure to a large group of people - in this case the perhaps 200ish people on the plane knowing it had a problem would probably count as the information being public and thus this test is not met and you are free to trade - I think the bar is around 30 people
I knew all those hours spent in compliance training would come in handy one day!
There's an interesting real world case of the distinction between US and UK/Europe rules about what is public from a few years ago. Someone acted on information from an overheard phone call on a train and was found guilty by a French court.
The fourth point, which most comments seem to be missing: would a court and appeals court take that same stance?
here in the US, quoting statutes on this topic is not useful because we also don’t have a specific statute, we have a couple of general fraud statutes that the regulator has contorted itself to fit scenarios in
Quant trader here... I'm a big seller of this list. Making money tends to be a relatively empirical endeavor. It's all about having information about the future and using that in judiciously way and less so about any particular theory or model. I see someone else mentioning Grinold and Khan "Active Portfolio Management", I can't recommend it enough, it's basically a how to for making money quantitatively in a principled way, there are lots of "tips and tricks" that go on top of this and it really helps to have some good intuition for the space you are trying to operate in (by that I mean understanding the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of your risk matrix). T-costs are also extremely important and the main "enemy" it's trivial to make money if you don't have to pay to trade.
Steven Boyd at Stanford and his students / colleagues are probably the richest seam of up to date portfolio optimization wisdom. If you are using python you shoult probably be using CVXPY to build your portfolio. He has lots of good papers, e.g. see [2].
Of course you also need an "edge", that information about the future, and that's the jealously guarded part...
It's simple to have information about the future in entirely legal ways. Usually the future information is available, just unequally distributed.
The best example of this is the movie "The Big Short" where it the information about the upcoming crash of subprime-backed bonds just required people to bother reading large amounts of bond composition documents. Only 3 groups really did this.
Another good examples is how some funds pay for logistics intelligence (via satellite reconnaissance, customs declarations etc) to forecast sales figures.
I don't think you can generally, but in specific contexts, having a model of the system allows you to extrapolate. For example, people who foresaw how the pandemic would or even could play out made lots of money. The further out you can connect the dots, to secondary or tertiary effects, the better. I did nothing personally.
Why would it be illegal if you're not directly involved with the corporation? Surely insider trading implies actually being some kind of insider. Like some politician selling stock before some regulation takes effect.
So you go to an event or something. Company guy says something stupid that convinces you they're doomed to fail and then you make money by shorting their company's stock. That's illegal?
As I understand it SVB is insolvent primarily due to incompetence, the actual actions they have taken: take deposits and buying US treasury bonds are every day activities for a bank. There are no exotic derivatives or off balance sheet special purpose vehicles. It's hard to regulate that away.
The most compelling piece of the puzzle to me (an engineer) is the notion of stress testing as part of regulation.
SVBs problems didn't appear overnight. With each rate hike they were a bit worse, but had they been forced to act earlier rather than later it would have helped a lot. Regular stress tests would have performed that function.
And yet nobody knows who the fools running the bank were. We don't have their names all over the news. It's as if SVB was run automatically, with no humans at the helm.
The rich really get to destroy lives without consequence.
True Story: I visited No. 11 Downing Street as a school boy in 1998 when Gordon Brown, our local MP, was chancellor. He took us next door to no. 12 where Nick Brown was chief whip, he started pointing out things in his office and as he was doing so a side door opened and a man stepped in. He pointed at the man and said "And that's a civil servant". The man reversed course, closed the door, opened it again and stuck his head around and said "Yes, minister". My classmates didn't get the joke, I did but was too stunned to laugh as Nick Brown and Gordon Brown had fallen about laughing and I was just thinking "aren't you meant to be running the country and not making TV jokes?" To be fair it was pretty funny :)
