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https://www.truthdig.com/articles/goodbye-to-the-dollar/
The inept and corrupt presidency of Donald Trump has unwittingly triggered the fatal blow to the American empire—the abandonment of the dollar as the world’s principal reserve currency. Nations around the globe, especially in Europe, have lost confidence in the United States to act rationally, much less lead, in issues of international finance, trade, diplomacy and war. These nations are quietly dismantling the seven-decade-old alliance with the United States and building alternative systems of bilateral trade. This reconfiguring of the world’s financial system will be fatal to the American empire, as the historian Alfred McCoy and the economist Michael Hudson have long pointed out. It will trigger an economic death spiral, including high inflation, which will necessitate a massive military contraction overseas and plunge the United States into a prolonged depression. Trump, rather than make America great again, has turned out, unwittingly, to be the empire’s most aggressive gravedigger.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @04:45AM (31 children)
Blaming Trump for stuff that happened in 2014:
Unbelievable.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Tuesday February 05 2019, @05:48AM (19 children)
Trump blames everything on his predecessors, principally Obama, so we may as well play the same game and blame this one on Trump.
And I have my suspicions about the Wall Street Crash as well...
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 05 2019, @06:29AM (18 children)
And I have my suspicions about the Wall Street Crash as well...
You can blame that on Hoover
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday February 05 2019, @06:33AM
The Great Depression was far worse than it otherwise would have been due to the Federal Reserve's efforts to support the price of gold. That led it to _not_ stimulate the economy at a time when such a stimulus was desperately needed.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 05 2019, @11:27AM (14 children)
Some breadcrumbs: Money appears (QE). Loans easy (rates low). Banks flush with virtual money. "Invest" it in stocks. S&P Boom! Defaults. VIX up. Ouroborus of stop losses and margin calls. Crash.
Same procedure as last time, Miss Sophie? The same procedure as every time, James.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 05 2019, @07:04PM (13 children)
It's to watch them try to expand the economy without growing the population by balancing it on the point of a needle [ssrn.com]. Scarcity now has to be manufactured.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 05 2019, @07:31PM
Let me come in again...
It's [fun] to watch them...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 06 2019, @04:40AM (11 children)
Making the food we eat now requires about a third of the land surface area of Earth (1/9 agriculture, 2/9 pastureland). Land is not so abundant that we can just ignore that as too cheap to meter.
Such as not doing 5% changes in GDP per year? That's a pretty fat needle.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday February 06 2019, @06:29AM (6 children)
Over half of produced foods are thrown away. Waste and corruption (primitive tribal politics) are what cause distribution difficulties. Capitalism doesn't work without scarcity and conflict. Without stratification, money doesn't flow.
Such as not doing 5% changes in GDP per year?
Voodoo economics are for entertainment use only...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 06 2019, @04:53PM (5 children)
Waste would happen anyway.
Obsession over such things is an indication of lack of abundance.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday February 06 2019, @06:22PM (4 children)
"Obsession"? Over a primary cause of our problems? Are you trying to appeal to authority again?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:35AM (3 children)
A lazy backhoe operator who takes two hour smoke breaks still digs faster than a guy with a shovel. Waste and corruption aren't primary with technological advancement.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 07 2019, @03:19AM (2 children)
Waste and corruption aren't primary with technological advancement.
They are the primary impediment to efficient and equitable usage and access. You are quite the apologist...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 07 2019, @04:09AM (1 child)
Which is just not that important. You started by emphasizing 50% food wastage. That's not very much.
What is this conversation supposed to be about? I'm hearing a lot of wooshing above my head right now.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday February 07 2019, @05:06AM
I'm hearing a lot of wooshing above my head right now.
Apparently so. You are simply hand waving away the entire truth. You are defending corrupt and wasteful authority. Cui bono
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by qzm on Wednesday February 06 2019, @08:43AM (3 children)
> Making the food we eat now requires about a third of the land surface area of Earth (1/9 agriculture, 2/9 pastureland)
Complete and utter bullshit. from someone who has obviously not traveled much.
Huge swarths of what get counted as 'pastureland' are not in any way actual pasture, because they count ALL grasslands as pasture.
Including a whole great load of africa, for example.
If you look at the percentage of the planet used at a reasonable level of intensity for such purposes, it is much MUCH smaller..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday February 06 2019, @04:52PM
If the grasslands has farm animals grazing it, it's pastureland.
Not seeing the problem.
I think we are doing so. I'll check my sources later when I get the time to see if there's a problem with them.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:13AM (1 child)
Not all the land was in present use, but it doesn't include land that was fallow for more than five years.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 07 2019, @02:14AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @03:37PM (1 child)
I blame Columbus. Had he never discovered America, Wall Street wouldn't even have existed!
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday February 05 2019, @07:36PM
Yeah, we'd all be like, "Occupy Frankfurt" 'n stuff...
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Tuesday February 05 2019, @08:55AM (5 children)
And, this is pretty much ignorant babble. Gold reserves have never been stored in the US. The US has trade deficits left and right. Countries do exchange their surplus dollars into gold (money being in the US implies gold is there). From time to time the surplus gold is transferred back. Still countries hold gold in the US in order to maintain high dollar liquidity. What is true though is that Bush and Trump did a wanton attack on the dollar by reckless debt accumulation. Obama did too, but arguably less unprovoked. That can work as long as the dollar is the world's currency. Dollars are used by other countries to do their trading and they need the dollars first. However, the US will soon pass the debt of Greece GDP-wise. The writings are on the wall.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @09:33AM
2008-2016 were years of unprecedented devaluation of the dollar in order to pump the stock market.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds [stlouisfed.org]
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL [stlouisfed.org]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 05 2019, @03:01PM (3 children)
So you're saying the US Bullion Depository [wikipedia.org] at Fort Knox doesn't exist? I mean, anyone who's seen Goldfinger knows about that!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday February 05 2019, @08:46PM (2 children)
No, he's saying the Gold Vault in the New York Federal reserve bank https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/goldvault.html [newyorkfed.org] doesn't exist. It's the one where foreign countries deposit bullion as foreign reserves. It is, as the great grandparent mentioned, the facility that our German friends decided to repatriate their gold from in 2017. https://www.kitco.com/news/2017-08-24/Germany-Gets-Its-Gold-Back-From-The-Fed-And-It-s-A-Big-Deal.html [kitco.com]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday February 05 2019, @11:32PM (1 child)
So, you say where Simon Gruber failed, others succeeded?
Well, bound to happen, I guess. Bruce Willis is no longer what he used to be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Informative) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday February 06 2019, @09:29PM
>So, you say where Simon Gruber failed, others succeeded?
Herr Gruber didn't want to take it back to Germany, they were going to buy a country.
There were some lively conspiracy theories that the German gold might already be gone in 2012-2013. The backstory is that Bundesbank asked the aforementioned reserve bank to help them repatriate the gold and the timeline estimate for repatriation was many years. It turned out that estimate was overly generous, and they finished in 2017 instead of 2020.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @09:50AM
Wasn't there an issue with Germany actually getting their gold back?
ISTR some fun story about them having even been denied access to check that the stuff was actually still in the Federal Reserve's vaults...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FatPhil on Tuesday February 05 2019, @11:12AM (3 children)
If you cannot distinguish between "Donald Trump has unwittingly triggered the fatal blow" and "Donald Trump is responsible for this and everything before this", then you are too ill-equipt to offer anything useful to the conversation.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 05 2019, @11:27AM (2 children)
He hasn't triggered anything and has no responsibility for this scam at all. Also, if he did unwind it that would be a good thing in the end.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday February 05 2019, @06:01PM (1 child)
Can't even give him the benefit of owning that.
Bush Junior was the one who did it. Clinton left a superpowerful US with budget surpluses that were shrinking the debt (voted by R congress).
W squandered all of it, the goodwill, the shrinking debt, the smack-you-and-we're-out foreign interventions, just as China was rising. Cherry on the cake, his government spent 6 years not preventing the Great Recession.
Yes the US has bounced back, created lots of riches, still has the best weapons, many of the most advanced companies... but it ain't the same great growing stable welcoming reassuring US that it used to be. People will keep using the place to grow their money, but they are a lot more careful about it. And trust matters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 06 2019, @09:23AM
Clinton only had a surplus on paper, US Debt went up under Clinton
(yes accounting technically if you take out a billion dollar loan this year with no income, then you are a billion dollars in the green this year, neet how that works isn't it)