No. of Recommendations: 20
One can hold assets other than US dollar cash or cash equivalents.
Well, yeah, sure. Theoretically. Not practical for almost all US people. Not many of us have the situation where we can float between Canada/France/Monaco. We are stuck where we are.
I would assume most on the board have a brokerage account?
Even if you don't have one that allows holding non-US cash directly like IB, presumably you could just put in a buy order for WIP or FXB or FXE or FXC or a non-US short term government bond fund or ETF? Seems practical for almost anybody, except maybe those with all their savings in a company retirement plan with very limited choices.
If the US dollar falls (far from a certainty but let's continue...) then your salary and many local expenses and US cash deposits fall...lose global purchasing power... but your holdings of other currencies hold up, meaning they appear to go up in value if you continue to think in dollars.
The total market value of the S&P 500 companies is down quite a bit year to date, not up. It just doesn't look that way if you do your accounting in the one major currency that has shrunk in this stretch. One share of SPY buys less general global "stuff" than it did in January. This is true no matter where you live.
Jim
