Tuesday, April 11, 2023

The World is Changing Before Our Eyes

 You have maybe seen that Saudi Arabia has a comedy show that makes fun of Biden and Kamala as buffoons.  You maybe remember when Biden ran out of Afghanistan and left tanks, trunks and weapons worth billions to our enemies.  You probably realize that nations watch how America will use the threats of bank account freezing as a huge club if a country doesn't do as the USA says.  Maybe you saw America recently bullying Uganda because they made their own decisions on protecting the family and denying LGBTQ any normal space in society.

All these things add up to a time when nations look at America and say, "I think that ship has sailed.  They are spending all their time and treasure on LGBTQ matters and fighting over what people group is the most victimized.  Plus they don't even know what a woman is anymore!  They've gone insane!"

The world is changing before our eyes…

Quietly, informed opinion is beginning to accept that America has lost its global influence. Even Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico are openly planning for a future where their international trade will turn away from North America and Western Europe to an Asia firmly bound into the rules of China and Russia — rules that insist on evolving payments away from the dollar to their own currencies or into trade settlement currencies being planned.

Whichever way it evolves, the combined membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Eurasian Economic Union, BRICS, and/or BRICS+ accepts a commitment to replace the dollar in pricing of commodities and raw materials and for settlement of cross-border trade. And the fact that nations in the Americas, the whole of Africa, the Middle East, and even Indonesia in South-east Asia are confident enough to jump ship from America and her dollar says it all. America is left looking like a Don Quixote, and Europe its Sancho Panza. It is the potential of 3.8 billion Asian people rapidly industrialising, benefiting a further 1—1 ½ billion or so in Africa and Latin America, against 1.3 billion in North America, Western Europe, and Japan refusing to take part.

Given that very recently the US began ramping up its belligerent rhetoric over China and Taiwan in the east in addition to Russia and Ukraine through NATO, perhaps we should welcome the first signs of this loss of hegemony and the green shoots of peace that may follow. For that is what it could be — an America recognising that her aggression is now untenable and that the battle for global control must be conceded. But that raises a vital question about the dollar’s future.

It is likely that the onset of banking problems in the western financial system becoming plainly evident is playing a large part in the battle of the hegemons — it is certainly consistent with the sudden emergence of multiple countries suddenly appearing eager to abandon the dollar, and therefore the entire western alliance’s currency system. The scene for this abandonment was set by Vladimir Putin at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in June last year, when 81 official delegations attended to hear Putin alert them to the dangers of holding dollars and euros in their reserves. Thus informed, they now appear to be mobilising.

The flaw in Western monetary thinking

Mainstream financial and economic commentary finds it inconceivable that the dollar will be replaced by anything else as the global reserve currency, the pricing medium for commodities, and the common factor in all foreign exchange transactions. This was the highly respected George Magnus’s take on it, extracted from an article he published in the Daily Telegraph last week:

“The tyranny of balance of payments accounting means that, if China and other nations run surpluses due to relatively weak domestic demand, others like the US and UK must run external deficits and accumulate debt. Cause and effect need to be the right way round.

“So the idea that the yuan can become a truly internationalised currency, perhaps a rival to the US dollar, is a narrative that lacks substance. 

“It could only happen if China allows the rest of the world to accumulate large claims in yuan. 

“That means either China has to run external deficits, which, as a mercantilist state with a single-minded focus on industrial policy, it will not.

“Or it has to permit free outward movement of capital, which it will also not do partly because it does not trust its own citizens to keep money at home, and partly because the resulting outflow of capital and fall in the yuan would destabilise its $60 trillion (£49 trillion) domestic banking system in which the proliferation of bad debt is already a problem. 

Xi’s China is, therefore, stuck between the devil of balance of payments surpluses and the deep blue sea of a closed capital account. Countries and companies may use the yuan more for the purposes of paying and issuing invoices, and even to denominate bonds sold to foreigners.

“Yet in worldwide payments, according to the SWIFT global messaging system used by banks, the yuan accounted for 2.2pc of payments last month, largely the same as two years ago.”

Magnus’s comments are consistent with Triffin’s dilemma. Triffin argued that for the dollar to be the world’s common currency, the US needed to ensure that there is a supply of dollars available for other nations in their reserves. The way to achieve this was for America to run trade deficits to ensure the supply is available. But continual trade deficits are ultimately destructive economic policies. Hence the dilemma: the creation of a reserve currency’s supply is likely to end in an economic crisis for its producer.

Robert Triffin described this problem in evidence to the US Congress in 1960. He was proved right when the London gold pool failed in 1968, when President Nixon abandoned the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1971, and presumably is about to be proved right again as the dollar-based banking system enters a new crisis. But despite the obvious truths in Triffin’s dilemma being proved by events, there is a flaw in it, and that is to not differentiate between currency, which is what Triffin assumed is used for trade settlement, and commercial bank credit which is actually used.

Here;  The World Is Changing Before Our Eyes... | ZeroHedge

When America does fall off the top of the mountain, it will be shocking and unimaginable to the average American who lives in LaLa land and has zero understanding of why the government can no longer give them free housing, free health insurance, free income and free education.  When America loses the use of it's UNLIMITED CREDIT CARD and can no longer charge anything that the politicians dream up...the crash will be heard around the world.

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