Tag Archives: China

The Final Chapter for Dollar Dominance and the Unipolar World Order

The US dollar is rapidly losing its status as the global “reserve currency.” One after another, nations outside of the western coalition are waking up to the fact that dollars are needed only to pay for imports that come from the United States. In trades with other countries they are choosing to begin paying one another by using their own currencies, as reported in videos like this. They are recognizing that the real resources that they own are much more valuable than the empty promises that are embodied in inflated US dollars or other political currencies. The exploitation of weaker nations by the western powers that has been ongoing for centuries is coming to an end and the emergence of a multi-polar world order is now unstoppable.

The Bretton Woods agreement that established the post-war world financial order in 1944 was based on the promise that US dollars would be redeemed for gold at $35 an ounce. But the continuous debasement of the dollar over the years made that completely unrealistic, and ultimately its impossibility was formally recognized when President Nixon in 1971 “closed the gold window” and announced that the US government was reneging on that commitment. It would no longer give gold for dollars except at the prevailing market price. From that point on the fate of the dollar was sealed; it was just a matter of time. Despite the imposition of a series of extreme financial, economic, political, and military measures by the US and its western allies, time has run out on dollar dominance and the unipolar world order.

The main questions now are, 1) to what further extremes will the western empire resort in its desperate effort to forestall the inevitable political reordering, and 2) what sorts of new monetary and financial arrangements will be established to supplant the old Bretton Woods arrangement?

Regarding the first of these, the past several decades have seen a succession of both covert and overt interferences designed to weaken or neutralize monetary dissidents and potential political and economic rivals. Notable among the former have been Saddam Hussein, who in 2000 began selling Iraqi oil for Euros instead of dollars, and Muammar Gaddafi the Libyan leader who had plans to launch a pan-African currency called the Gold Dinar to free Africa from American domination. As a consequence, both men were murdered and their countries destroyed. Following the NATO invasion of Libya, and the murder of Gaddafi, then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, disgustingly and arrogantly boasted, “We came, we saw, he died!”  

But nuclear armed Russia and China are not so easy to push around and brought to heel. When their Russian puppet Boris Yeltsin chose Vladimir Putin to succeed him as prime minister, the globalist western oligarchs thought they could continue to rape Russia and exploit its vast resources for their own purposes. But Putin surprised them with his loyalty to “Mother Russia” and his unwillingness to betray the Russian people to the globalists. Whatever we in the west might think about the man, his stance has clearly endeared him to the Russian people.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the western powers promised not to move NATO farther to the east, but they have reneged on that promise, and one by one have brought the former Soviet republics into the western fold. [Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has elaborated on this point in his recent speech and highlighted the importance of respect for Russia’s legitimate security concerns if ever there is to be peace]. Then, in 2014 the CIA engineered the overthrow of the elected government in Ukraine and replaced it with their own puppet government to further pressure the Russian government to play ball. The perceived existential threat of NATO weapons, even nuclear ones, on their very doorstep, was too much for Russia’s leadership to bear. It should have come as no surprise to anyone that the Russians reacted as they did to counter that threat by launching their “special military operation.” Putin had stated repeatedly that he hoped to negotiate a deal that would respect Russia’s national security interests but the US government has chosen to perpetuate the war in order to weaken Russia and force it to submit. Former nuclear weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, with his military experience and vast knowledge of the region provides a much more nuanced picture of that siltation than the biased sound bites one typically gets from the mainstream media.

Farther to the east, China a major economic, political and military power, has also balked at submitting to a New World Order in which the Western Empire calls all the shots. So now the globalist oligarchs who control the US government see China as a major obstacle to their plan for establishing a trans-human, technocratic utopia under the control of the elite Super Class. Hence, we see continual saber rattling, military and political provocations, and endless prating about the “Chinese threat.”

Regarding a new system of exchange and finance, I expect that we may soon see the emergence of a multilateral system for clearing credits among nations, one that will be more along the lines of the Bancor plan that John Maynard Keynes proposed at Bretton Woods in 1944. Not that Keynes should be the last word on the matter, but he at least proposed a way of preventing trade deficits from becoming perpetual as they are now, by imposing a levy (interest) on positive balances, as well as negative balances, that would seem to eliminate the debt trap. Professor Perry Mehrling provides a brief description of the Bancor plan in this video

I expect eventually to see the complete depoliticisation of money and the broader application of credit clearing directly among buyers and sellers at the level of individual traders, as they have been doing for decades through the scores of commercial trade exchanges that have been operating around the world. Money is, after all, merely an information system about credits and debits that enables goods and services that are sold to pay for other goods and services that are bought. Further, the settlement of accounts will be done not only through reciprocal exchange, but also through cooperative support and forgiveness of debts, which will bring with it greater fairness and finally a peaceful world. Indeed, there may someday be a world government, but it will not be imposed by force, nor will it be the product of greed and materialistic human minds.

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Addendum: In this excellent article, America Has Just Destroyed a Great Empire, Prof. Michael Hudson offers a history lesson that underlines the points I’ve made in my article.  

Here is a small excerpt:

Having endowed the region’s cosmopolitan Temple of Delphi with substantial silver and gold, Croesus asked its Oracle whether he would be successful in the conquest that he had planned. The Pythia priestess answered: “If you go to war against Persia, you will destroy a great empire.”

Croesus therefore set out to attack Persia c. 547 BC. Marching eastward, he attacked Persia’s vassal-state Phrygia. Cyrus mounted a Special Military Operation to drive Croesus back, defeating Croesus’s army, capturing him and taking the opportunity to seize Lydia’s gold to introduce his own Persian gold coinage. So Croesus did indeed destroy a great empire, but it was his own.

Fast-forward to today’s drive by the Biden administration to extend American military power against Russia and, behind it, China. The president asked for advice from today’s analogue to antiquity’s Delphi oracle: the CIA and its allied think tanks. Instead of warning against hubris, they encouraged the neocon dream that attacking Russia and China would consolidate U.S. control of the world economy, achieving the End of History.

But that’s not the way it’s working out. Please read the full article.

What in the world is going on? — Part 4

In this interview below Paul Craig Roberts describes the neo-conservative ideology that has driven geopolitics since the end of World War II, and discusses the elite agenda, the prospects for the Trump presidency, and the US economy.

He comes closer than in his earlier statements to highlighting the key control mechanism of domination—the global money system, but still falls a bit short, as indicated by his statement that if there is a severe economic crisis in the US, the Federal Reserve “will have to abandon the banks and save the dollar.”

On that I disagree. Roberts seem not to realize that the FED, as well as virtually all of the other central banks of the various countries around the world, is controlled by the big transnational banks, and that they work together to, as Prof. Carroll Quigley said, create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.

The banking elite thereby control not only the dollar, but all of the other major world currencies. If the inflation rates or unemployment rates become too high in one country, the central banks can spread the misery around by monetizing various securities and manipulating interest rates and currency exchange rates.

For the past several decades the US dollar has been their primary monetary tool, but the dollar is not the be all and end all in their schemes. You can be sure that the banking elite always have a plan. At some time in the not too distant future when the dollar has outlived its usefulness, it will be replaced by a single global currency that will give the elite even tighter control over financial, economic, and political affairs around the globe.

The flies in the ointment of their plan are (1) a few governments that are bent on steering an independent monetary and financial course, and (2) the emergence of independent, non-governmental and decentralized exchange mechanisms and currencies. In the first case, Iraq under Saddam Hussein and Libya under Gaddafi were easily disposed of (but at tremendous costs). Russia and China pose a much bigger problem for the elite, hence the stalemate in Syria and the drum beat of propaganda against Putin and the fear mongering against the Chinese. With regard to alternative exchange mechanisms, the proliferation of virtual commodities like Bitcoin and others suggests that elite control may be vulnerable to innovative and disruptive technologies. But these virtual commodities mark only the beginning of the new paradigm in money and finance. Ultimately, ways will be found to create an “internet of credit” based on decentralized, personalized, local control and backed by real goods and services.

What is Henry Kissinger Up To? — Paul Craig Roberts

This new post by Paul Craig Roberts is the best, most authoritative assessment I’ve seen of the current geopolitical situation and explains how the Trump administration is shaping up to possibly be in opposition to the neoconservative agenda and what Roberts refers to as The “military/security complex.”

He says, “Clearly, the military/security complex and the neoconservatives see Trump and Tillerson as threats, which is why the neoconservatives and the armaments tycoons so strongly opposed Trump and why CIA Director John Brennan made wild and unsupported accusations of Russian interference in the US presidential election.”

Read the entire article here.

Time to pay the piper: Who gets stuck with the bill?

Prior to his recent visit to China, Vice-president Joe Biden tried to assure investors that U.S. Treasury bonds are still a good investment, saying that the US administration “is deeply committed to maintaining the fundamentals of the US economy” to “ensure the safety, liquidity and value of US Treasury obligations for all of its investors”.

Good try, but the Chinese are not buying it, nor, it seems, is anyone else. The Federal Reserve has become of late the biggest buyer of treasury bonds, and Standard and Poor recently announced that they have downgraded the U.S. debt rating from AAA to AA+. Dollar denominated securities are now becoming a “hot potato” as loss of purchasing power of the dollar seems assured.

An August 19, 2011 article in China Daily titled, Experts urge China to trim US T-bond holdings, quotes both Chinese and American authorities and concludes thatChina should reduce its holdings of US Treasury bonds to protect the value of its massive foreign exchange reserves.” Here are some excerpts:

“China should move progressively to cut its holdings of US Treasury bonds and use it as leverage to ask Washington to further open its markets, including the high-technology sector, to Chinese investment,” Xiang Songzuo, deputy director of the Center for International Monetary Research at Renmin University of China, said at a forum.

“Washington should provide a guarantee on the safety of China’s assets,” while it is creating global inflationary pressure through quantitative easing to stimulate its economy, Xiang said

Zhu Chao, assistant dean of the School of Finance at the Capital University of Economics and Business, said Biden’s promises were more symbolic than meaningful.

Stephen Roach, the non-executive chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, said that the US debt crisis has shaken China’s confidence in Washington but the pro-consumption shift in its economic structure will help reduce the pace of its foreign-exchange accumulation.

“The US debt crisis has taken a serious toll on China’s confidence in Washington’s economic stewardship,” Roach said in a research note.

“China is no longer willing to risk financial and economic stability on the basis of Washington’s hollow promises and tarnished economic stewardship.”

The situation suggests some major policy questions that could have far-reaching effects on the American economy and on the American middle-class. China has, up to now, been willing to accept America’s i.o.u.’s in exchange for all those computers, TVs, shoes, clothing, and other goodies that Americans have been gobbling up at bargain prices. Now the piper must be paid, one way or another. Will Washington “further open its markets, including the high-technology sector, to Chinese investment,” as the Chinese are demanding? Will the U.S. government allow Chinese companies to buy up American companies, real estate, and infrastructure?

You can’t blame the Chinese for wanting real value in return for what they have already delivered. The fault lies with the policies of the past 30 years that, in the guise of “free trade,” have promoted the interests of the few at the expense of the many.—t.h.g.

Money, “Free Trade” and “the China Problem”

Professor Antal Fekete is an expert on the real bills doctrine and the gold standard. He is someone whose knowledge and insights I respect. This article, which appears on the SilverSeek.com website, draws important parallels between the opium wars of the 18th and 19th centuries and the current trade imbalance between the west (especially the US) and China. It’s the same game of looting but with somewhat different details.

While I don’t agree that a new gold standard is the solution, I recommend Prof, Fekete’s article because it provides the kind of historical perspective that is necessary for understanding what is really going on between China and the west. Rather than a gold standard, I think the world needs an objective, non-political standard of value based on a defined assortment of basic commodities. That is something I’ve written about in all of my books.–t.h.g.

Silver and Opium

By: Professor Antal E. Fekete

— Posted 16 February, 2011 Source: SilverSeek.com

The opium wars do not belong to the glorious episodes of Western history. Rather, they were instances of shameful behavior the West still has not lived down. Mercantilist governments resented the perpetual drain of silver from West to East in payment for Oriental goods (tea, silk, porcelain) that were in high demand in the Occident, facing low demand in the Orient for Occidental goods. From the mid-17th century more than 9 billion Troy ounces or 290 thousand metric tons of silver was absorbed by China from European countries in exchange for Chinese goods.

The British introduced opium along with tobacco as an export item to China in order to reduce their trade deficit. Under the disguise of free trade, the British, the Spanish and the French with the tacit approval of the Americans continued sending their contraband to China through legitimate as well as illegitimate trade channels even after the Chinese dynasty put an embargo on opium imports. Because of its strong appeal to the Chinese masses, and because of its highly addictive nature, opium appeared to be the ideal solution to the West’s trade problem. And, indeed, the flow of silver was first stopped, and then reversed. China was forced to pay silver for her addiction to opium smoking that was artificially induced by the pusher: the British.

Thus silver was replaced by opium as the mainstay of Western exports. In 1729 China, recognizing the growing problem of addiction and the debilitating and mind-corrupting nature of the drug, prohibited the sale and smoking of opium; allowing only a small quota of imports for medicinal purposes. The British defied the embargo and ban on opium trade, and encouraged smuggling. As a result, British exports of opium to China grew from an estimated 15 tons to 75 by 1773. This increased further to 900 tons by 1820; and to 1400 tons annually by 1838 — an almost 100-fold increase in 100 years.

Something had to be done. The Chinese government introduced death penalty for drug trafficking, and put British processing and distributing facilities on Chinese soil under siege. Chinese troops boarded British ships in international waters carrying opium to Chinese ports and destroyed their cargo, in addition to the destruction of opium found on Chinese territory. The British accused the Chinese of destroying British property, and sent a large British-Indian army to China in order to exact punishment.

British military superiority was clearly evident in the armed conflict. British warships wreaked havoc on coastal towns. After taking Canton the British sailed up the Yangtze River. They grabbed the tax barges, inflicting a devastating blow on the Chinese as imperial revenues were impossible to collect. In 1842 China sued for peace that was concluded in Nanking and ratified the following year. In the treaty China was forced to pay an indemnity to Britain, open four port cities where British subjects were given extraterritorial privileges, and cede Hong Kong to Britain. In 1844 the United States and France signed similar treaties with China.

These humiliating treaties were criticized in the House of Commons by William E. Gladstone, who later served as Prime Minister. He was wondering “whether there had ever been a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated to cover Britain with permanent disgrace.” The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston replied that nobody believed that the Chinese government’s motive was “the promotion of good moral habits”, or that the war was fought to stem China’s balance of trade deficit. The American president John Quincy Adams chimed in during the debate by suggesting that opium was a “mere incident”. According to him “the cause of the war was the arrogant and insupportable pretensions of China that she would hold commercial intercourse with the rest of mankind not upon terms of equal reciprocity, but upon the insulting and degrading forms of the relations between lord and vassal.” These words are echoed, 160 years later, by president Obama’s recent disdainful pronouncements to the effect that China’s exchange-rate policy is unacceptable to the rest of mankind as it pretends that China’s currency is that of the lord, and everybody else’s is that of the vassal.

The peace of Nanking did not last. The Chinese searched a suspicious ship, and the British answered by putting the port city of Canton under siege in 1856, occupying it in 1857. The French also entered the fray. British troops were approaching Beijing and set on to destroy the Summer Palace. China again was forced to sue for peace. In the peace treaty of Tianjin China yielded to the demand to create ten new port cities, and granted foreigners free passage throughout the country. It also agreed to pay an indemnity of five million ounces of silver: three million to Britain and two million to France.

This deliberate humiliation of China by the Western powers contributed greatly to the loosening and ultimate snapping of the internal coherence of the Qing Dynasty, leading to the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), the Boxer Uprising (1899-1901) and, ultimately, to the downfall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912.

The present trade dispute between the U.S. and China is reminiscent of the background to the two Opium Wars. Once more, the issue is the humiliation and plunder of China as a “thank you” for China’s favor of having provided consumer goods for which the West was unable to pay in terms of Western goods suitable for Chinese consumption. The only difference is the absence of opium in the dispute.

Oops, I take it back. The role of opium in the current dispute is played by paper. Paper dollars, to be precise. In 1971 an atrocity was made that I call the Nixon-Friedman conspiracy. To cover up the shame and disgrace of the default of the U.S. on its international gold obligations, Milton Friedman (following an earlier failed attempt of John M. Keynes) concocted a spurious and idiotic theory of floating exchange rates. It suggests that falling foreign exchange value of the domestic currency makes it stronger when in actual fact the opposite is true: it is made weaker as the terms of trade of the devaluing country deteriorates and that of its trading partners improves. Nixon was quick to embrace the false theory of Friedman. No public debate of the plan was permitted then, or ever after. Under the new dispensation the irredeemable dollar was to play the role of the ultimate extinguisher of debt, a preposterous idea. The scheme was imposed on the world under duress as part of the “new millennium”, shaking off the “tyranny of gold”, that “barbarous relic”, the last remnant of superstition, the only remaining “anachronism of the Modern Age”. The ploy was played up and celebrated as a great scientific breakthrough, making it possible for man to shape his own destiny rationally, free of superstition, for the first time ever. Yet all it was a cheap trick to elevate the dishonored paper of an insolvent banker (the U.S.) from scum to the holy of holies: international currency. The fact that fiat paper money has a history of 100 percent mortality was neatly side-stepped. Any questioning of the wisdom of experimenting with is in spite of logic and historical evidence was declared foggy-bottom reactionary thinking.

The amazing thing about this episode of the history of human folly was the ease with which it could be pushed down the throat of the rest of the world, including those nations that were directly hurt by it, such as the ones running a trade surplus with the U.S. Their savings went up in smoke. The explanation for this self-destructing behavior is the addictive, debilitating and mind-corrosive nature of paper money, in direct analogy with that of opium. The high caused by administering the opium pipe to the patient (read: administering QE) had to be repeated when the effect faded by a fresh administration of more opium (read: more QE2).

If the patient resists, like China did in 1840, then a holy opium war must be declared on it in the name of the right of others to free trade. 170 years later a New China once more demurred against the paper-torture treatment it was subjected to by the American debt-mongers and opium pushers.

But beware: if the West starts another Opium War, this time it is not China that will be on the losing side.

Reference: Opium Wars, Wikipedia, June 29, 2010.

China dumping dollars—but slowly

An Associated Press story reported in Forbes magazine indicates that China has for the past two months been  reducing its holdings of  U.S. Treasury debt. ” The $24 billion decline in China’s holdings in June followed a $32.5 billion drop in May. China’s holdings had hit a high for this year of $900.2 billion in April.” And this was down from their record high holdings of $939.9 billion reached in July 2009.

This seem to confirm my expectation that China would be diversifying its foreign reserve holdings away from dollar denominated securities.

The slack is being taken up by Japan and Britain so the immediate impact on the dollar in foreign exchange markets may continue to be minimal– for a while.

Central banks collude to advance their common objectives, but given the astronomical budget deficits and continued monetization of U.S. government debt by the banking system, it is unlikely that they will continue to support the dollar in the future as they have in the past. At some point, they will allow the dollar to slide into the void as they roll out their new plan for a global reserve currency. –t.h.g.

The days of dollar dominance are coming to an end

An article in The Financial Times reports that Brazil and China are working toward an agreement that will enable the use of their own currencies in trade transactions rather than the US dollar. This will be a major step that will encourage other countries to do likewise, thus reducing the longstanding dependence upon the US dollar as the international payment medium. As foreign dollar holdings stop increasing or are reduced, the US government will have a harder time selling its bonds. The buyer of last resort, of course is the Federal Reserve.  As the Fed and the banking system monetize ever greater amounts of US government debt, the purchasing power of the dollar will drop precipitously.

The only thing that has supported the value of the dollar thus far has been the “great recession” in which the business sector is starved for credit and ordinary people are starved for cash; that and the abiding myth that the dollar will always be “as good as gold.” — t.h.g.