Business

The U.S. dollar is currently accepted as the world’s reserve currency, but it hasn't always been this way. Reserve currencies change depending on macroeconomic trends: typically, the reserve currency belongs to the world’s most stable and influential economy. 

As HowMuch.net notes, the U.S. dollar has been the official reserve currency since the end of World War II, when the world’s powers agreed to implement the Bretton Woods System, officially setting the U.S. dollar as the anchor currency that could be exchanged at a fixed rate for gold.

If you subsidize something, you get more of it. Including debt and “free” money. Including the military-industrial complex. Including illegal immigration. And so on. Government subsidies are the prime tools of the central planners.

“He is the last of the old-time wildcatters,” Mike Madden, managing partner of private-equity firm BlackEagle Partners LLC says of departing Freeport-McMoRan executive chairman James R. Moffett, who is stepping down after falling commodity prices helped push the company’s shares to their lowest levels of the 21st century. 

Yesterday, when Saudi Arabia revealed its "draconian" 2016 budget, boosting gasoline prices by 40%, while trimming welfare programs after forecasting a collapse in oil revenue (even while allocating the biggest part of government spending in next year’s budget to defense and security) Bloomberg reported that "the kingdom’s 2016 budget is probably based on crude prices of about $29 a barrel, according Riyadh-based Jadwa Investment Co."

As you might have noticed over the past several days, the Russian ruble is in a veritable tailspin. The inexorable decline in crude has pressured the currency as have expectations of an uptick in year-end budget spending. 

The ruble fell to a record low against the dollar on Monday and depending on crude’s trajectory, could well fall further in the new year. 2015 will likely mark the third annual decline for the currency which is under pressure not only from low oil prices, but from biting economic sanctions tied to Moscow’s alleged role in Ukraine.