Excellent post oicur. I suspect we agree on a lot more than we disagree.
Western power is tied directly to the greenback status quo of hegemony
I read an (old) but excellent article covering this point, from the Chinese & Russian perspective that may interest you:
Military Power - Not Gold or the USD or the Renminbi - is the Real Coin of the Global Realm
Jan 27, 2010 11:23 PM
Without exception every financial writer has completely missed the point in the ongoing speculation as to whether or not the US dollar will be replaced or not as the worlds reserve currency.
It will. Here’s why.
China and Russia must work together to topple the American dollar as the world’s reserve currency. They simply don’t have any other option. It’s declare financial war on the US dollar or accept military conquest and slavery.
Suppose Russia had built up dozens of military bases in Canada and that China had built up dozens of military bases in Mexico and suppose that the US Government was making it all possible by loaning those two governments endless billions and rolling over their debt on an ongoing basis even though both were defaulting by cranking ever more IOUs like Bernie Madeoff on crystal meth. If that were the case every last American talking head would be foaming at the mouth and demanding that this lunacy be stopped at once. “Why are we feeding divisions of Chinese infantry just south of the Rio and why are we buying the gasoline for the thousands of Russian tanks just on the other side of the Great lakes?”
Do you understand what I’m driving at now? What I’ve just described above is exactly the quandary the Russians and Chinese find themselves in right now because we have surrounded them with an ever expanding super cluster of military bases while we foment subversion within their countries and prop up hostile puppet regimes on their borders.
How did we arrive at this horrid state of affairs? Let’s take a quick trip back to the end of World War Two in 1945. Every major nation except the USA had been bombed nearly back to the stone age and/or bled white. The only money accepted for trade between nations was the Almighty US Dollar. Not only that, but the USA was the only nation that at that time could offer vast quantities of capital goods of all sorts and they were usually the finest on the entire planet to boot. We lived in the best of all possible economic worlds. All the money we sent overseas was either returned to us to buy capital goods necessary for these shattered nations to rebuild themselves or it just circulated overseas to finance trade among foreign nations in which case we had a sort of credit card with no limit and no requirement to pay down either the principal or the interest.
No lets fast forward and take a cold, sober look at how things changed. Starting in the Seventies we increasingly stopped making things while the foreigners were increasingly making capital goods and consumer goods that were comparable to ours in both quantity and quality. American factory workers started to loose their good paying jobs but the Wall Street financial types were still on a roll because the dollar was still the coin of the global realm.
Then about the late Nineties things started to change. In late December 1999 one Euro was worth about one USD. Now, ten years later, one Euro is worth $1.40. In 1999 Putin clawed his way to the top of the heap in Russia after their bond default in 1998. Since then he has run the worst of the looting buzzards clean out of the country. Most flapped their greasy wings and found new roosts in London or America where the pickings are still easy. And of course by that time China was the supplier of cheap consumer goods to America putting and end to all the light manufacturing jobs in America. In 1996 Russia and China decided they had had a belly full of American Imperium and founded a political/economic/military alliance which is now known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the SCO.
Name one (non-military) capital good or valuable commodity that can only be purchased in America and not elsewhere. There isn’t a single one. Whether you’re talking machine tools or computers or bulldozers or medical equipment or locomotives or chemicals - all of these can be had from sources outside the USA and of at least equal quality. In 1945 the picture of the USA was huge eagle perched on the top of the globe. Today were more like Wiley Coyote who has just run himself off a cliff and is momentarily suspended in mid air just before the inevitable fall.
About the sole potential foreign exchange earner of consequence we have left is our agriculture production and if we export that (which we will) we’ll have famine here and non-stop food riots that will morph into a civil war that will depopulate the entire North American continent by at least 50%.
Don’t believe me? Suit yourself. Two years ago who would have believed that we’d be in a depression two years down the road. That was Black Swan Number One. His big brother is Black Swan Number Two and he makes his kid brother look like a tweety bird because he brings a famine that will culminate in a 3,000 mile long cannibal civil war. Black Swan Number Three is WWIII war with Russia and China to distract the remaining peasants so they won’t storm the Wall Street castle and march all the Lords to the Guillotine.
May the Cyclops eat you next to Last
Attila the Wimp
Military Power - Not Gold or the USD or the Renminbi - is the Real Coin of the Global Realm