News Note: Followup on Potential for Global Monetary Conference?

Earlier, we posted this article which examined some discussion about the potential for some kind of global monetary conference to take place at some point during the Trump Adminstration. This news note is a brief followup related to that based a new twitter comment appearing on the Twitter feed for Dr. Judy Shelton. Below are the relevant links for readers to look at in regards to this topic.

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Dr. Judy Shelton posts this comment on her Twitter feed:

"Enjoyed reading Barry’s commentary

@B_Eichengreen

and appreciate that

@greg_ip

found it interesting. But on what grounds does Barry assume President Trump would never propose an international conference to discuss monetary arrangements? He is unique in addressing the problem, no?"

She appears to be commenting on this recent article appearing on Project Syndicate by Barry Eichengreen. In that article, Mr. Eichengreen includes this comment:

"Consider Shelton’s call last year for a new Bretton Woods system. The goal, as she described it, would be to establish a “coherent mechanism for maintaining exchange-rate stability among national currencies,” the same goal as the one that was set at the original 1944 Bretton Woods Conference.

But in the absence of a global conference – something that would be anathema to Trump – the way to get there is the same as under the nineteenth-century gold standard. Then, the leading power, Great Britain, unilaterally fixed the domestic currency price of gold. . . . "

(read the full article on Project Syndicate here)

So, here again, we seem to have a somewhat cryptic reference to the potential for some kind of global monetary conference at some point in the future under the Trump Administration (although Barry Eichengreen dismisses that as "something that would be anathema to Trump").

All we can do is to continue to monitor events to see what actually does happen and then report on it. Of course, if some day there is a global monetary conference conducted by the Trump Administration (at Mar a Lago or anywhere else), that will be very big news of the kind we do watch for here. Until it happens, we can only assume it remains just speculation of something that could potentially take place.

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Other news note: The price of gold continues to surge and that is another thing we do monitor here. There are a variety of possible reasons why the recent upsurge has taken place, but Jim Rickards offers this potential geo political situation as something to keep an eye on in this recent comment on his Twitter feed.