When I was younger in 2010, during a brief stint as an English teacher in Saudi Arabia that didn’t end harmoniously for the involved parties, I was struck by the fact that I could buy cigarettes from the corner store in dollars.
I had a vague appreciation prior of the global dominance of the dollar, but it had never occurred to me that it could be used to conduct mundane transactions halfway around the world.
Those days are, if not over, soon to be over.
Via Business Insider (emphasis added):
“Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said BRICS countries are developing a payments platform that will allow them to bypass the US dollar, per TASS, a state news agency.
The initiative came from a summit of the BRICS countries in Johannesburg last year where the group — which includes the key members of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — called for more trade and lending in their national currencies.
Lavrov said on Monday that the platform will improve the international monetary system and allow payment in national currencies for mutual trade. Russia is keen to move its trading partners away from the dollar because it faces significant sanctions from the US and its allies.”
The U.S. government cannot print its way out of this mess because the only value that it derives from the dollar, it being based on nothing, is based on global demand. When no one wants its trash anymore, it becomes just that.
When it prints money — a misnomer anyway, because it’s actually just digits in a computer — the whole operation is predicated on people and entities wanting more of it.
But the world has apparently had enough of the Ponzi scheme, so shit’s going to get super weird, which is bad news for anyone who loves empire and great news for anyone who hates the U.S. government in its current form. Massive pain is on the way, but it’s coming one way or another and something better might just come out of the other side.
When empires collapse, reckless wars tend to begin to try to stem the bleeding and unite the discontented domestic audience behind a new cause. It rarely works out well for the empire, which, out of hubris and desperation, stretches itself too thin. The barbarians then storm the gates, as it were, and the rest is history.
The parallels of the current American empire to the Roman empire’s final days are uncanny.
Via Fox Business (emphasis added):
“The BRICS bloc of countries led by China and Russia are moving ahead with their efforts to move away from the U.S. dollar with an announcement that they plan to create a payment system based on blockchain.
The five-nation BRICS group, which also consists of Brazil, India and South Africa, will work on creating a payment system based on blockchain and digital technologies, Kremlin aide Yury Ushakov said in an interview with Russian agency TASS late Monday.
“We believe that creating an independent BRICS payment system is an important goal for the future, which would be based on state-of-the-art tools such as digital technologies and blockchain,” Ushakov said.”
From a self-interested perspective, this is not a development I welcome, as I still deal in dollars even while living overseas. But reality is reality.
On the positive side, though, the U.S. government won’t be able to waste nearly a trillion dollars on “defense budgets” any longer to start global wars, nor will it be in a position to export child trannyism or any of its other degenerate machinations throughout the world by leveraging its financial dominance. As long as finances matter, it also won’t be able to exert the same degree of domestic political oppression and surveillance as it once did — although it will certainly try to continue doing all of those things, possibly via World War III to try to maintain its global position.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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