The Chinese government holds over $2 trillion in reserves. The dollar is an asset that has lost 33% of its purchasing power since 2002. And with the U.S. government creating boatloads of easy credit with low interest rates, the long-term picture is even grimmer.

Those reserves are a liability, and the Chinese want out. Here’s how they’re fleeing the dollar…

China’s coal imports are 2.8 times what they were last year. As of May, oil imports were up 14%. Imports of iron ore and copper are reaching record highs. And it’s not just raw materials…

In February, China Development Bank loaned $10 billion to Petrobras (the Brazilian national oil company), $15 billion to OAO Rosneft (a Russian national oil company), and $10 billion to Transneft (Russia’s national pipeline company).

So far this summer, Aluminum Corp of China invested $19.5 billion in giant base-metal miner Rio Tinto. China’s national oil company Sinopec paid out over $8 billion for Addax Petroleum’s oil fields in Iraq and offshore Africa. And the state-owned China Investment Corp just bought a $1.5 billion stake in metals producer Teck Resources.

China is dumping dollars for all kinds of hard assets and commodity infrastructure. It’s also dumping those dollars for gold.

From 2003 to April 2009, China secretly increased its gold reserves by more than 75%. Today, it’s the fifth-largest sovereign gold holder at nearly 34 million ounces. That’s over 30 times the amount of gold the Chinese government held in 1990.

Right now, that much gold is worth about $32.6 billion – just 2% of China’s total dollar reserves. China’s frantic to exchange more of its trillions of dollars for gold. But only about $150 billion in gold bullion trades in a given year. The government can’t put all its dollars to work in the bullion market without driving gold prices to the stratosphere.

That’s why China is pouring resources into its domestic mining industry.

The Chinese central bank buys all the gold Chinese mines produce at a fixed price. In 2007, China produced about 9.7 million ounces of gold – making it the world’s largest producer ahead of South Africa, which produced about 9 million ounces.

China’s the world’s third-largest country, covering about 3.7 million square miles. That land is incredibly rich in mineral wealth – it potentially holds over 320 million ounces of gold.

Only a handful of public companies are working with the Chinese government to expand the country’s production. Those companies will reap huge rewards as China dumps its dollars into its domestic gold industry.

Sino Gold (SGX on the Australian Exchange), for example, is a $1.2 billion China-focused gold miner. It owns two operating mines with two more under construction. The company’s remarkable ascent began in 2001, when it acquired a small project called Jinfeng. In just six years, Jinfeng went from a rough one million-ounce resource to the country’s second-largest gold mine.

It would be difficult just to permit a U.S. mine in six years, let alone bring it into production.

China’s government is so eager to get its hands on more hard assets, it’s willing to go to almost any lengths to kickstart its mining industry. That kind of support can yield tremendous returns for smart investors.

Good investing.

Source: S&A Resource Report by Matt Badiali

The Crash of 2008/9 should be seen as yet another consequence of long-term, persistent US inflationary policies. Inflation doesn’t stand still. It tends to establish a self-reinforcing cycle that accelerates until the excesses in money and credit become so extreme that a correction is triggered. The bigger the inflation, the bigger the correction. Once a dependency on credit expansion is well established, correcting the underlying imbalances becomes extremely difficult.Return to discipline in the current environment would be too painful and dangerous.

The inflationary implications of the twin deficits (current account and fiscal), as well as the steady increase in private debt, have been moderated by the integration of emerging markets into the global economy. The massive increase in industrial output from China, India, and others has enabled persistent credit inflation in the US to occur with virtually no consequence to date (other than periodic asset price bubbles and shakeouts). How long the disinflationary impact of emerging-market productivity growth will persist and how long these nations will continue loading up on Treasuries, will be instrumental in determining the course that the Great Reflation will take.

Reflation is the act of stimulating the economy by increasing the money supply or by reducing taxes. It is the opposite of disinflation. It can refer to an economic policy whereby a government uses fiscal or monetary stimulus in order to expand a country’s output. This can possibly be achieved by methods that include reducing tax, changing the money supply, or even adjusting interest rates. Just as disinflation is an acceptable antidote to high inflation, reflation is considered to be an antidote to deflation (which, unlike inflation, is considered bad regardless how high it is).

Tougher regulation is surely appropriate, but it will not stop the next inflationary run-up unless the system is fixed. In the final analysis, newly minted money and credit must find a home somewhere.

Prior to government bailouts and stimulus, the panic, crash, and precipitous economic decline of 2008/9 were clearly on track to be much worse than the post-1929 experience. The pervasiveness of leverage – from banks to consumers to supposedly blue-chip companies – and the illusion of stability in the system, were fostered through the 25 years that this credit bubble has grown, basically uninterrupted.

The Great Reflation Experiment ultimately has two components. The first is a rise in federal government deficits, debt, and contingent liabilities. The second is an expansion of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet.

In the short run, huge deficits and growth in government debt are necessary. They will continue to play a crucial role in deleveraging the private sector and in helping to fill the black hole in the economy that has been caused by the sharp increase in household savings. Further out, government deficits will put upward pressure on interest rates. However, much of the economy, particularly housing and commercial real estate, is far too weak to absorb an interest-rate shock.

The bottom line is that the Fed is in a very difficult position. Its room to maneuver is either small or nonexistent, and the markets understand this. That is why there is a sharp divergence between those worried about price inflation and those fearing a lengthy depression.

In the next six to 12 months we look for a weak but recovering US economy, a continued deflationary price environment, pretty good asset and commodity markets, and continued narrowing of credit spreads. This view is based on the assumption that the new money created has to go somewhere, a stable to modestly falling dollar, and an anemic world economic recovery next year.

So, what do you think is the most foreseeable scenario for 2010-2012?
Let me know your comments.