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Related: About this forumBrave New Bank? BRICS moot dropping dollar, IMF
Uploaded by RussiaToday on Mar 29, 2012
The BRICS summit has wrapped up in India. Creating an alternative global lender and stepping away from the dollar as a reserve currency were among their main objectives. RT's Priya Sridhar is in New Delhi.
Earlier RT spoke to Dr Sreeram Chaulia, who is a Vice Dean at the Jindal School of International Affairs. He believes institutions like the IMF and the World Bank have outlived their uselfulness.
- And they're off!
bongbong
(5,436 posts)I'm surprised no one has commented on this. It's potentially the story of the century. If the dollar is dropped as a reserve currency, the USA will become a 3rd world nation overnight (the parts of it that aren't already 3rd world).
The only recourse the USA will have is invading every country it can with any natural resources, and forcing them to trade in dollars.
That is, any country it hasn't done that to already.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)...is to acknowledge the reality of it all.
- For many, that's just too hard a thing to do......
''The most potent weapon of the oppresser, is the mind of the oppressed.'' - Steven Biko
Dokkie
(1,688 posts)conversation will lead to topics like the Federal Reserve and all the non sense they are doing. Who wants to use a currency that is inflated like a balloon every year? The ball will drop on the American system once we loose the petro dollar and this is going to be the catalyst to it
And then once you start talking about ''Down with the Fed'' you'll immediately be labeled a:
- I know people are scared, but the fact is, dollar's going to fall and the fallout will be tremendous. Especially for the unprepared......
banned from Kos
(4,017 posts)The US Dollar is still king of the currencies.
The ECB and Bank of Japan are just OK. Investors love the USD and US Treasuries.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)...and little else. The don't create many jobs and are in fact busy laying off their own workers at present. But of course that old scenario of humming American factories and businesses is never coming back anyway. Computers and robots have now taken the place of much of the America workforce.
So yeah, investors love the Fed, but I suppose I'd love them too if someone gave me as much money at 0% rate (and after you factor in inflation they're actually paying people to take those worthless bonds off their hands) as these clowns have given to the Wall Street investment banks.
However, Russia and China don't love the Fed, and the proof of this is that they're no longer buying up our Treasury bonds. Nonetheless, we keep printing money (i.e. - creating more 0's on computers), and inflating the dollars that are already in circulation (in people's pockets). The value of which goes down by the hour. Which is why gas prices and food prices keep going up even though purchases of those items are at all-time lows. So you see, the law of supply and demand only applies when it increases corporate profits.
Then there's the little issue of the $600 trillion in worthless bonds that will come due a little later this year.......
- Never mind.
banned from Kos
(4,017 posts)There are only $15 trillion in US Treasuries in existence and 1/3 are held by government agencies like the SS Trust Fund.
And no one gets 0% loans from the Fed. An overnight loan is 1/10th of 1% or so with collateral.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)http://etfdailynews.com/2011/12/21/oversight-to-the-600-trillion-derivatives-market-did-financial-regulators-just-let-us-down-again/
http://www.investorplace.com/investorpolitics/derivatives-the-600-trillion-time-bomb-set-to-explode/
http://seekingalpha.com/article/310194-derivatives-the-worlds-biggest-margin-call-and-how-to-play-it
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dennis-m-kelleher/another-wall-street-win-m_b_1094565.html
- My work here is done. No, really.
jakeXT
(10,575 posts)The US could still launch a couple of wars
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)They're not afraid of US like they used to be. People are waking up.
Thank goodness......
Read the signs, people. They're everywhere except on American television.
txlibdem
(6,183 posts)I don't want the US Dollar to be the standard for anything but greed, avarice, and death. The dollar's central role in world monetary affairs has covered up the failings in the US economic system. American Capitalism is a failure; of that there should be no doubt. And now we can't use our control over international currency to fake our way out of our failures.
Now we'll have to have a REAL economy.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)...eventually. But people won't like it at first because we'll have to slogged through very difficult times for a while. But we can't "fix or cure" the world's economic problems with capitalism still in-charge.
Dokkie
(1,688 posts)I hate the system we have now but the prospects of having a real economy kinda scares me. With the dollar standard, we are in control of our debts hence able to avoid a Greek style disaster . I dunno what I want to see happen, but I really hope the "real" economy never comes live.
DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)We don't control anything. In this rotten system banks create money out of thin air, which is based upon and backed by -- absolutely nothing. What we're doing is simply putting off decisions of today, onto our children and grandchildren, tomorrow.
Capitalism is CANCER.
- It's time for people to wake up......
. . . as {the usurer} fed on insolvency and controlled legislation, the laws were as ingeniously contrived for creating debt, as for making it profitable when contracted. . . As the capitalists owned the courts and administered justice, they had the means at hand of ruining any plebeian whose property was tempting.
Nor was Adams perception of the nature of law confined to ancient Rome. He was able to see, clearer than his contemporaries, that it is no mere coincidence, nor a lex naturae, that the modern legal system is concerned mostly with the protection of property rights:
Abstract justice is, of course, impossible. Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation. As competition sharpens . . . religious ritual is supplanted by civil codes for the enforcement of contracts and the protection of the creditor class.
The more society consolidates, the more legislation is controlled by the wealthy, and at length the representatives of the moneyed class acquire that absolute power once wielded by the Roman proconsul, and now exercised by the modern magistrate. Thus the modern legal system is infinitely subtle, and its enforcing officers equally efficient, in punishing those forms of theft which are not practiced by the ruling class; but robbery in the market-place is governed by primitive controls which lag far behind the sophisticated mechanisms which company lawyers contrive to circumvent them. One measure of a society is the problems it chooses to solve.
Romes ruling class was unable to restrain its rapacity, even in its own ultimate interest. Adams saw what liberals are rarely willing to admitnamely, that a system based on corrupt practice cannot be saved merely by tinkering with it. The stronghold of usury lay in the fiscal system, which down to the fall of the Empire was an engine for working bankruptcy. Romes policy was to farm the taxes; that is to say, after assessment, to sell them to a publican, who collected what he could. The business was profitable in proportion as it was extortionate, and the country was subjected to a levy, unregulated by law, and conducted to enrich speculators.
MORE: The Economics of Human Energy in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University - http://www.whitings-writings.com/diatribes/ehe03.htm
50000feet
(115 posts)Fasten your seat belts -- or jump to a safer harbour.
Thanks for posting. I'm forwarding the link to everyone I can think of.