Gestern bekam ich Post von Joseph Quinlan, dem Chef-Strategen der Bank of America. Darin erzählt er von einem Erlebnis, das ihm vor kurzem an der Grenze zu Myanmar passierte. Ich will Ihnen die Anekdote nicht vorenthalten, sie ist so lustig wie befremdlich wie bedenklich. Es geht um den US-Dollar, oder genauer um das, was aus der Leitwährung geworden ist.

Burma and the Buck: A Painful Lesson about the Unloved Dollar

As a store of value, just how unappealing the U.S. dollar has become was painfully brought home to me on a recent one-day visit to Burma, or the Union of Myanmar, as the country goes in official circles. Getting into Burma is not all that hard and the price admission is rather cheap—$10 to be exact. Yet what seemed like a bargain proved to be an embarrassment and a sobering lesson on how low the dollar’s image has sunk around the world.

It all started when I dropped a $10 bill in front of the two Burmese guards preparing my paper work at a Burmese trading post near the Golden Triangle. Up until this point, the line entering the dusty guard house had been moving rather quickly; rarely looking up, one guard gathered the cash while the other stamped an official-looking piece of paper and off you went. Burma is not known for being efficient but these folks hand it down until, that is, I plucked down a crisp $10 bill.

The process came to a standstill—or so it seemed. Muttering and chattering ensued. Anything the guards said to me was lost in translation. I was low on Thai baht, so I pulled even more dollars out of my wallet. That seemed to only create an even bigger commotion. There was more confusion until my guide finally came hurriedly back to see what all the fuss was about.

He knew immediately. As he took the $10 bill from the guard and handed it back to me, he sheepishly asked me to pay in baht, not dollars. “Baht is better” he explained in broken English. He was no doubt referring to the 31% appreciation of the baht against the U.S. dollar since the beginning of 2005, a change in fortunes that has even Burmese border guards dishing the dollar …

Der Thai-Baht als Hort der Stabilität. Das ist die Währung jenes Landes, das immer noch von Putschisten beherrscht wird … Für Quinlan ist die Anekdote jedenfalls ein wichtiges Indiz dafür, dass der Dollar seinen Status als welt-Reservewährung mehr und mehr verliert.

… In the long term, however, the fate and fortune of the dollar will be dictated increasingly by the willingness of investors in the developing nations to accept and hold the greenback. It’s the developing nations, after all, that control a disproportionate amount of the world’s excess savings (roughly two-thirds of the global total). Their preference for either dollars or euros, or any other currency for that matter, will bear directly on the future value of the dollar.

Grund zur Panik? Nicht unbedingt:

The good news: with Burmese border guards pining for anything but dollars, perhaps the buck has indeed hit bottom. What could be more humbling?