Now that everything quietened down, it’s time for me to talk about other important details. I was in Athens yesterday. Today I’m in Turkish republic of Northern Cyprus and I’m really grateful that I can get to speak of other things outside Trump’s letter to President Erdoğan.
As I said before, I was in Athens yesterday to attend a series of invitation-only events, hosted by WPP, where, as opposed to conventional seating plans, the speakers get to discuss ideas sitting in a 360 degree plan while igniting new discussions but without giving any presentations. In this series of events, I started a discussion on “the future of economy, banking and finance”. I think I perfectly succeeded in sending the questions towards the right direction thus melting the forecasts of the invitees from different nationalities in a single pot. By the way, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to WPP Country Chairperson Demet İkiler for giving me the opportunity to attend such high-quality event.
Caroline Criado Perez, the author of a recent best-selling book on gender gap titled “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men”, was successfully hosted by Ms. İkiler, whom we are so tremendously proud of. We need this book urgently translated into Turkish! The wonderful thing about these events is that participants have any idea about the titles of positions of other participants. Everyone is equal and get to call each other a first-name basis.
A lady of African descent who made great efforts to teach us how to correctly pronounce her name or a man who got to travel the world in a London-style taxi cab, each and every guest takes the floor in turn. But each story told has its own special message to the world.
“Dollar is expected to reign for another 25 years…”
As I was preparing for the panel yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice some news about the dollar’s reign, according to which, Central banks expect dollar to reign supreme for another 25 years. Almost 66% of officials from thirty central banks participated in a survey by the UBS happen to agree with this prediction. Last month, the IMF stated that nearly 62% of central banks’ total foreign exchange reserves, which is 11.7 trillion dollars, consists of American dollars.
When we look to the past, we can see that not much has changed over the last 25 years since more than 60% of central banks’ reserves have comprised US dollars.
Almost 40% of survey participants also expect that Chinese yuan will become a reserve currency as valuable as dollar or euro over the next 25 years.
By the way, the same IMF report says that Euro has 20% share in total foreign exchange reserves in the second quarter. Obviously, the statistics would be different if this was a nation-wide conducted survey. The only thing that is not changing is that the US Dollar stands out a medium of exchange or a store of value rather than functioning as the national currency of the United States.
