For some time both China and the Russian Federation have understood, as do other nations, that the role of the US dollar as the world’s major reserve currency is their economic Achilles Heel. So long as Washington and Wall Street control the dollar, and so long as the bulk of world trade requires dollars for settlement, central banks like those of Russia and China are forced to stockpile dollars in thge form of “safe” US Treasury debt, as currency reserves to protect their economies from the kind of currency war Russia experienced in late 2014 when the aptly-named US Treasury Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence and Wall Street dumped rubles amid a US-Saudi deal to collapse world oil prices. Now Russia and China are quietly heading for the dollar exit door.
Category: Japan
On Monday November 30, the Chinese currency – the yuan – will join the dollar, euro, pound and yen as the world’s official reserve currencies, as recommended by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Are we reaching the…
In the last couple years US-NATO forces have intentionally pursued an aggressive path with a current trajectory leading humanity straight into World War III. In contrast to the West’s overt warmongering transgressions, the political, economic and military…
Themes of security in Northeast Asia and the Korean Peninsula cannot be viewed as secluded issues from the rest of Asia, the Eurasia landmass, and, even more broadly, the rest of the world. Northeast Asia’s…
With the approach of the much ballyhooed Paris Climate Summit, the world is being conditioned to accept the spread of the renewable energy gospel. As shams go this one is a doozy. Absent from the…
I began this morning reporting on Britain’s next king saying climate change is partly responsible for Syria’s civil war, and his blaming the refugee crisis and civil war there on drought. In an exclusive interview with…
Aspiring to Rule the World The idea that the United States has “interests” abroad is an affront to democracy and geography. How can a country have interests, and not only that, but vital ones, in every corner of the world, unless we ignore geography and the idea that the people who live in a place ought to own it, and organize their own affairs? All the same, US leaders regularly pronounce that the United States has vital interests abroad, and that the possession of these interests warrants the “projection of power,” which is to say the establishment of a military presence in a region to intimidate its people and governments to acquiesce to US demands. Rarely, if ever, do the mass media explore what these “vital interests” are. They simply exist, and must be defended. Occasionally, their nature is at least superficially glimpsed, as in the idea that the Middle East is a vital US interest owing to its vast reserves of oil, and that if these reserves were to come under the control of a “hostile” power, the world could be held to ransom. Elements of this view can be traced to the Carter Doctrine and form much of the basis of what is presented as US strategy in connection with the Middle East.
US-China Conducted A “Friendly” Military Exercise Less than A Week Before the Downing of Russia’s Jet Fighter by Turkey. The downing of a Russian jet fighter over Syria’s airspace was undertaken by Turkey in consultation with…
Silk Roads, Night Trains, and the Third Industrial Revolution in China The U.S. is transfixed by its multibillion-dollar electoral circus. The European Union is paralyzed by austerity, fear of refugees, and now all-out jihad in…
Europe is in free fall. Nobody can doubt that any more. In fact, the is EU simultaneous suffering from several crucial problems and any one of them could potentially become catastrophic. Let’s look at them one by one. The 28 member EU makes no economic sense The most obvious problem for the EU is that it makes absolutely no economic sense. Initially, in the early 1950s, there was a small group of not too dissimilar nations which decided to integrate their economies, these were the so-called Inner Six who founded the European Community (EC): Belgium , France , West Germany , Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. In 1960 this “core group” was joined by seven more countries, the Outer Seven, who were unwilling to join the EC but wanted to join a European Free Trade Association (EFTA).