The vast amount of frozen assets is in Europe, with only around $5 billion in the US. From what I understand the latest scheme is to get Europeans to seize the money and transfer it to the United States. The assumption here is that the risk falls on Europeans only. It will be interesting to hear what ECB and Euroclear have to say.
If he axes the income tax and replaces it with higher tariffs, we'll all be free to move overseas and leave our remaining Americans with higher priced goods while we enjoy much cheaper goods purchased "pre-tax" so to speak.
I even know enough to understand that anybody who chooses a moniker representing one of the most bloodthirsty anti-American revolutionaries in contemporary history is not an American in any way that matters.
Idiotic idea, worthy of Trump. Simp's the greatest bar none at military analysis and I admire the heck out of him, but a sucker for Right-wing distractions.
Trade is only a small portion of USD usage. The entire Eurodollar structure in place is for ASSET management. Just look at those multiple trillion dollars corp like NVDA, MSFT and AAPL etc. They attract capital from all over the world including from China. Chinese Mom-and-pop is directing money to the US stock market last year and the half. Unless RU+CN wise up and understand that the US is now waging an informational warfare with attracting capital with this Artificial Intelligence Narratives, RU+CN ain't winning this war. Also, with the amount of USD denominated debt, you're looking at the USD shooting way up against EUR and JPY before dying its slow death. WWIII revving up would also help attract capital from the EU to park in the US for the foreseeable future.
That's true but the difference is trade is actual physical goods/commodities backed by that coin, whereas your 'assets' are basically thin air given that all those company valuations are just bubbles (NVIDIA etc) as the AI bubble appears to already be peaking or have peaked, particularly with OpenAI now hinting the next iteration won't be anything special (ChatGPT 5, etc.) because LLMs appear to have hit a wall, or rather a ceiling, which you referenced.
How about that coming bill:
"Much of our $35 trillion in national debt is short term, Within 12 months it has to be refinanced at 5% or more. Much of the debt was below 2%, now refinancing at over 5%. Interest payments on the debt are $1.1 trillion per year. Likely to reach $1.5 trillion per year in 2025."
Hope so. I am so sick of my friends bragging about their winnings in NVDA, SMCI and AVGO. All led by taiwanese americans. They take those "Enron" tactics to the brim with Coreweave or whatever shit buying up its chips and then collateraling them for more dollars to buy more chips up.
You know what's funny. My high school friend is working in a small mainland chinese bank's branch in HK (Dongguan bank). He is responsible for the treasury department and manage the bank's investing portfolio. And he just bragged about how the bank ONLY invests in US treasuries of different duration and US corp bonds; and has hardly any exposure to any mainland china equity. Lol...
This isn't what fintweet makes it to be. Hard to tell at this point. Those involved in naked-shorting GME are also the same folks involved in gamma squeeze those NVDA and Mag3 every damn day, including today. Those BTFD just won't stop. Lol...
This isn't what fintweet makes it to be. Hard to tell at this point. Those involved in naked-shorting GME are also the same folks involved in gamma squeeze those NVDA and Mag3 every damn day, including today. Those BTFDippers just won't stop. Lol...
Nah, fiat money systems need at least semi stable economies, they print money correlated directly to state loans. And almost all Western bloc nations have to much debt. Some debt was always bought up by countries like China or Saudi Arabia, big chunks actually. If the trading in Dollars goes down, and it goes down for the last 2 years, then automatically the value of the Dollar goes down. That's what you already see with high inflation rates in the West. Russia and China don't have those problems.
But the West, the US and its vassals are a big bloc, so it could be, just a possibility, that they somehow manage to survive the next 10-20 years, with 2-5% and 5-10% inflation yearly. But I doubt it, as in The Sun Also Rises from Hemingway said, “How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
The debt is to large right now, but of course they could scam their way to another 5, 10 or even 20 years, given the amount of brainwashing and lack of knowledge of the majority of people in the West. Money has always an psychological imprint also. But again, I doubt it, the Elites are frankly to dumb to understand that their clever Russian Asset ploy will work as an absolute catastrophe for their own financial systems.
And all of those great companies like NVIDIA, Google, Apple, well, what, just what if the inflation goes on, the Dollar looses steadily value, and all those big companies also implode on the stock market? Because the stock market value is always just a bet on the future. Because many people are putting their money into the stock market because of the high inflation. Then it goes Boom.
I KNOW that a really accomplished con man/Harvard MBA will always be able to con me or somehow end up profiting from my work... So I avoid any fuckstick trying to sell me a vision of somehow accruing unearned profits and laugh at the idea of investing a single penny more into Wall Street's smoke and mirrors. Sad that the first 40 + years of my working life had a suck of SS "contributions" and the SEP/IRA scam worked on me via financial 'advisors'. Never again. My excess valuta is stored in the form of canned food & shotguns...
I think Simp is joking with you. It sounds like a quote from famous British humourist PG Wodehouse, whose butler Jeeves is always getting master Bertie Wooster out of trouble. Just a guess.
Obvious sarc/ For the kids in the back...No scam... especially IRAs in US markets they are the best performing in the world? Sure I lost a shit load in 2008 like everyone else but gains more than made up since. We live in a capitalist world best be a capitalist not a worker. I make more retired/mandatory withdrawals than I did working in fact.
Judging from anecdotes related to me by those slightly to RATHER older than myself (mid 60s)- "Most people don't" is a restrained but accurate assessment.
Short term debt because I suspect (if you follow Eurodollar discussions and the war for it) that once Euro banks start lowering rates first, the US will have won the dollar ownership wars and ended the Eurodollar system. That just started happening (Europe started cutting rates). Now we finally see unemployment rates starting to jump almost on cue. Hence, now Powell can cut some rates heading into the election. The Europeans decided they were going to lose the war and handed the US an opportunity to help keep Biden in office.
Exactly -- great point about dollar ownership. I would add that the balance sheet state of European banks is MUCH worse than US banks. They were riding that free (zero bout) eurodollar train WAY too long.
I wouldn't put money on Powell cutting rates before the year end. Too many are assuming his non-zero bound interest rate policy (ie Yellen's nemesis) is really about inflation. It's about sucking up all the Eurodollars floating around the world (Euro is not the world currency so you are comparing apples and oranges) under the guise of a response to inflation. He needs to stop the monetary impact of all the shadow off shore US dollar stores. Where do you think all these NGO's (sic) get their access to capital? Which then fund social and economic unrest in the US , not just in the ROW.
People need to remember who creates inflation in the US is it Powell or Yellen's fiscal shit show? Listen to Yellen's wailing-- that is the clue. War is an expensive racket. And how many is Yellen funding or setting up? Cross fingers Treasury can cover/sell all the debt rolling over this year and next. How many more trips will Yellen take to China begging them to buy? How easy is that going to be given the sabre-rattling of Biden and crew?
I'd look at it this way - every iota of national wealth going to guns can't go to butter. The reduction in butter directly impacts inflation inasmuch as fewer goods are on offer. Perhaps the US financing this thing on the cheap makes more sense in this regard. We give $50bil to the Ukraine and it turns out to be payoffs to US MIC contractors for the most part, and shipment of boneyard vehicles that the US had no intention of using again. So where is the butter impact there? Mostly positive. Save money on mothballing old vehicles.
The inflation in the US is a hangover from COVID, all that paying people to stay home and do nothing. Too much money was injected into the economy and every extra dollar spent on consumer goods causes real inflation. So it's not really related to Ukraine, which is a drop in the bucket.
Now if the nature of the support to Ukraine changes, all bets are off.
Gotta say it's weird, though, for the Treasury Secretary to go to Mexico, as she did in Dec 2023, & shill for continuing the war in Ukraine. Can't miss a tie-in to complex U.S. finances.
She's in Mexico & she's talking not about U.S./Mexico interests but the war in Ukraine--?!!?
Juxtapose that with all the threats against Russia. And on another topic, the ludicrous pushing in media of this anti-semitism agenda to deflect war crimes charges against Israel. Why? Perhaps intel organizations coordinating a response that somehow undoes the loss of power and withdrawal of the US worldwide?
Latest month's figures went to 3.3%. Not huge, but not inconsequential either. When combined with zero growth in full time employment over the last year and a half, this is very unappealing. The difference between actual wage earners and household survey information is getting important, as many people are now doing multiple part time jobs to make up for the inability to find full time work.
" ... whereas your 'assets' are basically thin air given that all those company valuations are just bubbles (NVIDIA etc) as the AI bubble appears to already be peaking or have peaked, .."
It is way way worse - all these companies (BR, BH, ...) have crossholdings of each other and are on an imaginary upward spiral no one seems to realise - tulip-mania 10.0 if anyone asked me.
Fundamentals have been thrown out of the window a long time ago, if they were ever there considering the fig leaf approach based on the gospel of THE SYNAGOGUE OF MAKE BELIEVE ... all wishful thinking, not only "AI"!
People like Dr Jeffrey Funk and Professor Darius Burschka on LinkedIn and Gary Marcus on Substack and LinkedIn are very interesting on AI and especially AGI. It does seem to be a bubble all right.
There are historical reasons why global trade uses the USD, as well as operational ones. Neither are set in stone and both are well worth working to replace if there is a desire to - which there is now.
Nor is your obvious lack of understanding of international trade, helping your already offbase understanding of dollar supremacy and the end of same - much less the even more egregious lack of understanding of just how dollar supremacy benefits the US.
A simple example: This is the US' M1 money measure
This is interesting because the Fed decided to try and capture dollars in circulation, outside the US in 2020. As is obvious from the graph - M1 thus went from ~$4 trillion to well over $20 trillion. This matters because this extra $16 trillion is additional US dollar monetary mass by which US money printing can occur with reduced negative effects.
Sure, M1 is not the only measure of money/dollars but it is equally misleading to focus on M2 and other measures because the other ones are much more heavily tied into actual physical assets whose value drives the value of bonds/loans against said assets, not the other way around like in trade.
Surpluses: the whole point of Bretton Woods was to address sovereign surpluses via the mechanism of exchange at the gold window - because everyone understood that such surpluses added enormous international instability. It was the US' abuses under Lyndon Johnson that led the US/Nixon to break the gold window; it was replaced by the US Treasury entirely due to US machinations.
But this grand experiment in the US setting its own currency as "global reserve" is ending. The dollar is not going to disappear but the amount of financial feudalism based parasitism on the Global Majority is shrinking literally every day even as the Global Majority economies outgrow the West.
The reason people - particularly in the United States, among othe - care about the denominator currency of trade is because it confers benefits.
Your utter lack of any real world grounding or even apparently any serious effort to understand this space only reinforces the paucity of your thought.
On AI, what is becoming clear is that people with IQ of over 150 can achieve huge workloads using AI (and people with IQ under 130 can't).
It's main role will not to be to replace humans, but to hugely increase the importance of IQ amongst humans. We all know that that means - China wins big time.
Er, I suspect the "high Chinese IQ" theory might be an artifact of poor sampling. The hundreds of millions of rural peasants who are never tested might actually be the same, or lower, than other groups. Since it is only the most driven and highly intelligent who made it to the west, we might only be measuring a highly biased sample, and making an incorrect extrapolation to the whole.
I agree I can find very few here in Europe - but many many more in China where they not only have higher IQs but also very good methods to accelerate the career paths of highly talented people into positions with responsibility.
Never believe salespeople. One of Microsoft's internal requirements for sales is to 'make the market'. And what they mean by that is to create opportunities where none exist mostly by bullshitting people.
LLM-based "AI" is the current bullshit. The stuff is barely usable for actual prose but somehow we are to believe it's going to take over the world. It should seriously be a Turing test for people to read some AI-generated prose and recognize it is not by a human. Only the very dumb will succumb.
Just like believing that anti-semitism is the reason why Israeli genocide is abhorred.
Maybe. It's hard to prognosticate, but I think more thought on how it all works is probably required. Usually our approaches are inadequate when we wait around for the technology to catch up.
LLMs didn't hit a wall. In fact, there's recently been quite a bit of a breakthrough, when someone suddenly realized they don't need to run on float matrix multiplication, but simple ternary logic works fine and is much faster - meaning that everyone has been running LLMs on completely wrong hardware.
But still... LLMs are just bullshit generators and nowhere near any "AI".
What they do quite well though (but they're still far from perfect),
is characterization of the context of the conversation.
That's why they push OpenAI crap to every website, why new computers have NPUs, why suddenly you get features nobody asked for like "Recall" in Windows. They simply offload the spyware to your own computer instead of running everything in massive data centers.
Of course they will tell you your data is not uploaded anywhere. It doesn't need to be. It's analyzed on your own device. It only needs to report a thought crime from time to time.
The way I understood USD "dominance" is simply convenience. There is no rule that USD must be used for all trade, its just that USD must be used to buy oil, which everyone needs a lot of, and to do that they need to buy USD.
Since all countries needed to have a supply of USD sitting there waiting to use to buy (OPEC) oil with, rather than buying potentially 100s of other currencies (as was probably the case before the Euro unified all those European currencies) they just traded in the currency that everyone needed to hold a supply of, USD. It was simply convenient.
And if OPEC decide that we no longer need USD to buy oil, then it will still likely take a while before all the countries spend their supply of USD and start thinking about trading in other currencies. If they even do.
But if we're not selling oil to each other there is no need to specify USD. For example, when the company I work for in Australia sells items to companies in New Zealand, we agree to trade in AUD and it is highly likely that NZ already has a supply of AUD and doesn't need to buy any more just for our transaction. And when we sell items to China, we can trade in AUD or Yuan, whatever is convenient for both parties, but since everyone still has USD right now, why not use them up?
Countries are not overtly forced into using USD. However, the US represents an enormous market for the world's exports. For them to sell their goods to American consoomers, they must accept dollars. The trick here is that the dollars they earn through trade overwhelmingly flow back into US treasury notes. So whoever wishes to sell their products to Americans ends up investing back into America anyway. As an unfortunate consequence for Americans, the near infinite demand for treasury notes causes low yields. Low yields makes for an unattractive asset class. Instead, given the Fed mandated inflationary environment, Americans pool their money into real estate and equities (which in reality are all meme stocks whose performance hardly has anything to do with real metrics). The pouring of money into real estate is particularly egregious as it prevents access to the good itself for those who don't already own it.
Yes, this too you're 100% correct. To sell items to the US, the US will pay with USD of course. Since everyone needs USD to use to buy oil, they'll accept them. And the same goes for many other transactions between countries that aren't the US.
The "pooling of money into realestate and equities" is just an excuse for creating additional debt which feeds inflation/growth. All money is debt and it has to get created somehow. Realestate and equities are as good a reason as any.
Economic principles have certainly changed over the past couple of decades. The "traditional" economy that extracted raw materials and transformed them into useful finished goods to sell for profit is no longer the case. Now we just create as much money as we need by growing the pool of debt and use interest rates to govern the debt expansion rate.
I don't know the US figures off the top of my head, but here in Australia we have 2.8 trillion dollars that presently exist in our economy as mortgages. And it just keeps growing.
When you say all money is debt, you mean "all currencies are debt". This is true of all modern paper (fiat).
To quote JP Morgan: Gold is money, everything else is credit. When the USD was backed by gold, it was as good as gold, which is why it became so universal post-WWII, esp in the rebuilding of Europe. Most European countries had shipped their gold to the US for safekeeping prior to 1939, and were in no particular hurry to get it back. Sometime in the 1960s the French got sniffy and started to swap their $$$ for gold. Other countries followed suit, and in 1971 Nixon was forced to close to gold window and stop the drain of US gold reserves. Effectively, he was saying "The US is bankrupt, what you going to do about it?" The answer was ignore it. The world pretended the US was still solvent while the petrodollar system was put in place to support the $$$. Oil therefore replaced gold as the dollar's backing mechanism.
It's obvious that the trillions of debt the US has accrued can never be repaid. It is theoretically possible, yes, and this is why the world pretends it's not a problem. When it reaches the point of no longer possible, things become interesting.
Phillip, I know nothing of these financial manipulations, please tell me when US debt reaches the point of no longer possible. I thought we were long past that number.
It's all a big game of confidence. Theoretically the debt could be paid back over a 30-50 year period, but life would be very rough. In practice, it's not going to be paid back. Historically, all governments in this position have used inflation to manage debt and the USG is doing the same. If enough people lose confidence in the USG's ability to pay back the debt, i.e. a politician speaks the truth, then it's game over.
Sooner or later everybody needs energy, food, and key resources (metals, fertilizers, industrial feedstocks, etc.), as well as the manufactured products created by industry that depends on energy, food, and resources. If you don't have those no amount of financialization will conjure them out of thin air for you.
All that debt in Australia, for example, would not enable people to survive without exports of iron ore and other exports. You can't feed people by trading debt back and forth if nobody has any food.
That's why when push comes to shove, the world can live without financialization, but no one can live without energy, food, resources, and manufactured products.
There is nothing the US creates that the world cannot live without. The US could disappear tomorrow and the world would continue living, because all the energy, food, and resources the world needs Russia can provide, and all the manufactured products the world needs China can provide. The US has fallen so far behind as a provider of energy, food, resources, and manufactured products to most of the world that it is no longer indispensable.
China and Russia, in contrast, have pulled so far ahead as providers of manufactured goods, energy, food, and resources that they now are indispensable to most of the world. Half of the world's countries depend on Russian food or resources (fertilizer to grow food) to avoid food insecurity. The EU is now demonstrating how even wealthy countries who have the best alternative options are discovering that without access to Russian energy they cannot maintain the lifestyles their people expect. They cannot maintain their economies while paying two to four times more for US energy exports.
US consumers also cannot continue consuming from abroad when US sanctions have impoverished them through inflation and higher energy, food, and resource costs. Selling to US consumers is not a factor for Russia, but it is a big factor for China and thus the reason China is investing so intensely into developing Russia as well as the countries of the Global South into big consumers of Chinese manufactured products.
As it is now, most countries do not need to buy anything from the US. They can get all the manufactured goods they want direct from China (which manufactures most "US" branded products in any event), and all the energy, food, and resources they need from Russia. They can use yuan or rubles for those transactions.
Financialized countries that have been hooked on dollars through financial schemes will still need dollars, of course, but such financialization is usually a sign that the country has ceased to be an indispensable provider to the rest of the world. It's usually a sign the country is no longer competitive compared to countries which can still competitively produce manufactured goods or export energy, food, or resources.
Yeah, that's how I see it also. Many Empires in the past then cannibalized their vassals, I think Simplicius said the same a couple of times and in his article here. It's interesting to see how far that will go, for countries like Germany or Japan whose populations are gullible on the whole 'allies' and 'partners' thing, the population will wake up very late, maybe even not at all. The US already swallowed up a lot of big German companies.
I think China and Russia anticipated that for a long time. They obviously knew the bad intentions of the Western blob against them. Of course they knew, they try to get military camps all around them for the last 30 years, despite all the talk of 'friendship'. But they play chess, not checkers like most Western Elites. I think its pretty much over, no trick, scam or something else can help the West anymore, they lost their spot of the geopolitics pyramid to China and Russia. I don't see any angle where they can take the lead in the next 20-30 years. Economically, Militarily, Diplomatically, Infrastructure, Commodities maybe Canada, US, Australia have a lot of resources, otherwise no chance.
that sounds ominous -- if you believe the USD is tops forever, good luck. The USA is so indebted now that it is on a tightrope. And other nations have power over us, as well, with that debt. If the US wants to play hardball, it is going to get a hard one and a fast one back from those we wish to hurt.
we're buying less and less kids. all my American compatriots will know this. The prices at the grocery store for many families is eating into even their small savings -- things are becoming unaffordable. There is economic malaise aplenty at home and abroad and our greed and unwillingness to share power with anybody -- not even our NATO pals -- has led us here. I think we are at the part where the gods have driven America insane before destroying us.
One thing I'd like to mention is the americanaffairs article does not go deep enough - it does not analyze "why" religious societies have higher birthrates and how to exploit that to raise birth rates in a secular society. The secret is that women living in religious societies and regions are "manipulated" by the religion to think that having large family = high social status. For women the pursuit of social status is everything. This is also why women in capitalist societies stop having kids. Capitalist societies convince women that career >>> family and that having a good job = high social status. It's not about the economics of having kids, thats just an excuse to justify it used by those who don't want kids. But if you improve the economic situation, they still mostly don't have kids.
So what do I propose? "Manipulate" young women into thinking that being a house wife and having a large family = glamorous and results in high social status. And make women who have careers become socially ostracized. This will need to be done through media propaganda, where all the glamourous "celeberties" have large families. Also make it illegal to become a celeberity without a large family.
Observe in 20 years, most young women will stop purusing careers and will instead start pursuing families. As the saying goes "change her mood, not her mind"
The bottom line is that agricultural societies have large families because each additional worker has an incremental economic benefit. Post-industrial societies find having children to be a burden rather than an advantage - they have no real economic value and actually reduce your standard of living. Explains those charts perfectly - the very poor and very rich don't have any concerns about protecting their standard of living - social welfare programs and gluts of income make sure of that.
You aren't going to change that easily. Paying women to have kids isn't going to work if strictly defined around the birthing process. There are going to be lots of people who will look at the lifelong returns and still say no.
Scipio's is a brilliant diagnosis and solution, rooted in real human values and not the cold, stunted inhumanity of metrics. Utterly on target.
I note, it would replicate what made the Boomers so rich: investing in hospitals, schools, and baby shoes for all those kids. A healthy society is one that prioritizes and protects safe family formation above all else.
The surplus of the North is eyed greedily by the fecund South; the only thing the world is running out of is White people, that is, the very fountain that created unheralded surplus. Scipio's insight is meant for us, the only people in the world who care about picking up the trash.
that is the logic. but people still think that history has ended, even vis a vis the dollar. The dollar used to be backed by gold. Now it is backed by nothing. It is silly to think it will hold in competition against serious currencies.
The eurodollar system has nothing to do with the backing of the Euro or the Dollar, or their physical quantities in the monetary system, it's a transactional/banking system that uses those currencies to denominate the value of assets to allow exchange between different countries with different currencies. It's just a faster way of settling transnational trades. So the "problem" isn't just the Eurodollar system, it goes much deeper than that, Ru/Cn would have to crack down on individual financial actors investing in the US stock market.
It's sort of like how the West thought that kicking Russia from the SWIFT system would upend their financial sector, but SWIFT is just a messaging system, it doesn't change the underlying structure of the Russia financial sector. Same with the Eurodollar system, it's just an accounting tool. Banning it wouldn't stop investment in Europe or the US.
"eurodollar" has nothing to do with euros, even though it's mentioned in the name. Eurodollar simply means 'dollars not used in the US'. From investopedia: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/eurodollar.asp
Sure, but it's not just dollars, but anything not in the US that is denominated in dollars. Most of the "dollars" in the eurodollar system only exist on a balance sheet of some bank. This is why there is a war on physical cash and a push for CBDCs. Because almost all of the money is virtual, if people actually withdrew their deposits, the entire house of cards would come tumbling, so they need to prevent you from pulling out. The FED printing press is a fucking joke compared to hoe easily private banks "create" money.
So what do you propose? Is the eurodollar system here to stay and essentially unbeatable? Or can accounting systems be switched if the accountat(s) are viewed as unreliable?
Remarkable that the trading platform may outlast the nation that built it, just as English might outlast England.
Both the global business language and the Eurodollar system (which arose because of the Iron Curtain) are utilities of convenience.
Another allegory could be Microsoft Windows, which became a programmer's standard to write software to.
This is a really good, tough question. I think 'switching the accountant' might be the place to look- but that would mean the BIS itself, if not just the Federal Reserve.
What do you mean, what do I propose? I'm not proposing or objecting to anything, I'm just making a basic observation, which is the Eurodollar system is just a transactional system which allows financial actors to move capital efficiently around the world, by using the dollar as a reserve currency.
And people invest in the American stock market because it offers good returns, not because of the Eurodollar system, although that obviously helps. So until and unless the rest of the world starts sanctioning and cracking down on imvestments flowing into the US, or the US stock market no longer offers the returns that it does now, people will keep pumping money into it.
When push comes to shove, the world can live without financialization, but no one can live without energy, food, resources, and manufactured products.
You don't see that, yet, in the US because the US continues to be a producer of enough energy, food, and resources that shortages do not occur within the US which would make it clear what is real and what is faith in Ponzi schemes. But already outside the US the wrenches the US is throwing into the fungibility gears of the world's financial clearing houses are creating local shortages that are making entire countries less certain they will not be the last one holding the empty bag when the Ponzi scheme music stops.
Countries who want to be competitive in their exports and who do not have the vast wealth inertia to burn up of EU countries cannot depend on overpriced alternatives to Russian energy and resources. Over half of the world's countries are dependent on Russian energy, food, or resource exports to avoid food insecurity. When the US weaponizes the dollar, those countries will find a way to buy the Russian energy, food, and resources they must have with payment in yuan or rubles. They can't buy the energy, food, and resources they must have with NDVA stock denominated in dollars. They also learn the lesson that dollarized assets are dangerous to hold.
In a milder way, but still in a leading edge of catastrophe way, Americans are also starting to experience shortages from lack of US production of real, and not Ponzi, assets: Americans from lower class all the way up through the middle class are experiencing a form of food insecurity in that they can no longer buy the food they would like. As a result of inflation and failure of real incomes to keep up with inflation, even professionals in American can no longer eat steak as often as they would like. They do things like buy whole chickens to cut up themselves at home because that is cheaper than buying pre-packaged chicken breasts and thighs. They can't walk into a supermarket with a printout of their NVDA position at their brokerage house and trade that for a high quality, aged steak.
Before anybody gets too excited about AI being a US thing, keep in mind that AI valuations, whether a bubble or not, all depend on chips that are made in China (according to US law, Taiwan is part of China) and on computers that are made in China. The big valuations of NVDA, MSFT, and so on that have gotten a boost from AI cannot exist without the large server farms that are full of computer systems and chips that are all made in China. No China, no server farms. No server farms, no ChatGPT.
To an increasing degree, the actual design elements of AI, both silicon and software, are also nothing exclusive to the US.
The actual neural net software that powers AI is very simple stuff. There's not much to it, with the value of AI arising from two brute force efforts: the first is the brute force manufacturing in China of hundreds of thousands of computers that get put to work in large server farms, and the second is the brute force "training" of the AI models using data harvested from the world wide web and supported by manual labor working mostly in India.
You could add to that a third brute force component, the electrical energy that powers the hundreds of thousands of computers which run the models. Anybody can buy the computers and chips from China that are needed to run the models, and anybody can download the open source for the models, but not everybody has access to the affordable, reliable electricity that economically competitive mass use of AI requires.
The infrastructure for AI is not all that expensive, either. ChatGPT is what? only a $10 billion or so effort? That's chump change for either China or Russia. But access to vast, unlimited, inexpensive energy to run AI everywhere is not chump change.
So if you want to be an investor who bets on trends going forward instead of what's already happened in the past, the countries best poised to leverage increasing values in AI are those that have the hardware and chips (China) and the energy (Russia) and mass numbers of highly educated IT personnel (China, Russia, and India). Combinations of those countries like any two or all three together will be especially competitive.
LLMs are a game for the dumb/easily persuaded. The fact that Russia and China aren't going overboard in this direction is going to be to their benefit in the end. No digital statistical model is going to emulate intelligence, no matter how much CPU and storage you throw at it.
I despise the use of the term "AI" for it. This is a scam, plain and simple. It's a self-training expert system and has the same limits such expert systems have had since they came into vogue in the 1980s. It's just that the coupling of voice recognition with LLMs has baffled the masses.
The fact that really tells the tale is that the majority of effort in LLMs lately has been in writing filters in the query language to alter the delivered results and cover up the 'hallucinations' that LLMs often have by controlling the nature of the queries to work around the hallucinations.
Edited to add: In short, they are controlling the output by altering based on heuristics because no one understands exactly how the LLMs actually work. In the CS world, you've already lost at that point. See: spam filters, antivirus software. Human-readable LLM output is a field of study, but hasn't come to fruition yet and may not in the first place. Orders of magnitude more expensive cpu-wise than the current illegible stuff.
"The fact that Russia and China aren't going overboard in this direction" Not so. Russia and China have made extensive use of neural networks and LLMs. They're going "all in" on them because of their utility. They're just doing so with much greater expertise than you find in the West, because they have a far larger pool of expertise they can use. Please read the term "they" in the above not meaning centrally planned economies controlling all details but rather in the sense of a very rich and highly decentralized free market economy with many players independently chasing good ideas. The governments just give some very broad incentives, like even lower taxes for IT firms.
Some of the results are gadgety and some of them are extraordinarily practical and revolutionary. For example, the Lancet drone swarms that now loiter and autonomously hunt use neural networks within the swarms to coordinate their attacks. Russia's largest bank, Sber (the name comes from the first syllable of the Russian word for "savings account", so you could call it "Save" in English with a meaning of "invest" overlaid...) has very many neural network / AI projects. For example, they just rolled out a quick, contactless payment method where when a merchant rings up a purchase you just smile at the Sber terminal (a small rectangle on a stand) instead of waving your phone or watch at it, and your smile approves the transaction. It recognizes you and knows when you are smiling. That's gadgety to my taste, but it's highly effective, convenient, and popular. The AI required to with extraordinarily high reliability work as people want while not permitting the million scams that might be attempted is highly nontrivial.
"It's a self-training expert system and has the same limits such expert systems have had since they came into vogue in the 1980s." No. This is completely different technology that 1980's expert systems used. It really is revolutionary. That it is essentially a very simple, brute force thing does not mean it is not totally revolutionary.
"No digital statistical model is going to emulate intelligence" Neural networks are not digital statistical models. That's not how they work. Instead, they work by analogy with how the human brain seems to work. They do end up implementing results in some uses, such as LLMs (large language models) that have a lot to do with statistics, such as the statistics of which words more often appear in various settings, but the underlying machinery of how that's done is a neural network that is roughly analogous to what the brain does.
At the very lowest level, human brain function depends on the sheer brute force interaction of about 90 billion neurons, how they connect to each other and how impulses from one neuron can propagate to others. That's why modern AI models are called "neural networks," because the brain is a very complex neural network, albeit a different type of neural network than what is implemented with chips. The complexity of the brain is much greater than the relatively small number (90 billion is a small number in such brute force things) of neurons because neurons have multiple connections to other neurons and they're not simple on/off devices. Human neurons are analog mechanisms, and not digital mechanisms as in chips. To emulate a single brain neuron using simpler logic structures as found on AI chips you typically need multiple layers of chip "neurons", around seven. But the overall idea is similar.
"no one understands exactly how the LLMs actually work" Not so. People understand very well exactly how LLMs work. Knowing how the thing works is not the same as the practical ability to follow along in each step of the billions of interactions that result in some specific output, such as the generation of a specific word or sentence.
"Human-readable LLM output is a field of study, but hasn't come to fruition yet" Not so. If by "human-readable" you mean, say, English language text that you can read and come away with the impression that a person with good language skills wrote it, well, that's absolutely routine.
That's part of the problem with LLMs in that their ability at language is so extraordinarily good that you often end up with a very persuasive, apparently very knowledgeable conversational partner who tells you lies (what I call "hallucinations").
That LLMs tell lies is not the fault of the LLM, it's the fault of the marketing people who are using LLMs in a lazy way to go beyond the simple creation of correct language to the purported creation of correct technical insights in matters such as programming or medicine. Neural networks are actually a very good approach to generating solutions in matters such as programming or medicine. For example, there are millions of neural networks walking around (we call them "people") who have achieved enough learning to more often than not generate correct solutions to programming or medical problems. It's just that humans often have a "tell" that other humans sense when somebody is opining beyond the edge of their reliable experience, while LLMs tend to be uniformly persuasive and well spoken.
As the businesses backing the bigger LLMs invest into more training for things like programming and medicine, those models will get better at generating more accurate solutions in such areas. They'll still make errors as even human neural networks do, but they'll rapidly get to where they make far fewer errors than most human neural networks do.
By the way, perfectly well spoken LLMs can now be run on your desktop computer with nothing more than a $300 plug in GPU card. You need at least 8 GB of on-card memory but a $300 card will have that and it will open the door to all sorts of LLMs for language generation, image creation, and creation of music that is a lot better than the elevator-music filler that now dominates pop music.
Envision a remote satellite vehicle. Imagine this vehicle is dependent on its sat link for all comms. Envision a lack of personnel at that location who know anything about pointing a dish and getting all the COTS equipment like routers, switches, baseband radios, LoS radios and servers mounted in the vehicle up and running. The lack of personnel is caused by MTOE limitations - they want shooters, not technicians.
This would seem to be a great application of LLM technology. Train up something that knows how to bring everything up and running, and knows how to jiggle things to get it to work. It's not really all that hard. Even forward on the relevant log entries when the connectivity comes back up so that the LLM can be improved. 3 years of effort on producing such an LLM failed miserably. I could have written it in a shell script...but that wasn't what was wanted. Instead my company made many millions off of selling LLM technology to the government to not accomplish this task.
Best part of the whole story - the company was MSFT.
So, i'm not going to make the full appeal to authority saying I used to sell this BS. But I did. And I didn't tell the truth then, but i'll tell the truth now, what we all knew internally. It's not very useful or functional and a good expert system would be better than a trained model. You could audit that...
I hope you don't have much money at stake in this because it's not going to go well over time. I got out of it partially because selling bullshit and assuaging ripped off customers isn't much fun.
"What's the difference between a used car salesman and a software salesman?
- the used car salesman knows when he is lying."
One of the problems MSFT has had over the decades is its very success. When companies enjoy an ocean of money flooding in it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish employees who are competent from those who are very adept at playing the system and presenting themselves well, yet the ones who present themselves well are the ones who get promoted. That has an extremely corrosive effect over the years in many jobs, and not just executive jobs. It's one reason MSFT is famous in tech circles for plodding away doing a poor job at most of what it attempts, but still managing to make huge amounts of money because the Windows monopoly washes away all of MSFT's other sins.
One of the things that makes the effect hard to reduce is that very often it's not based on dishonesty: people sincerely try to do a good job and provide what the system around them seems to want. The result is you get staff and executives who are well liked and who often have outstanding people skills, but they don't have the technical competence to make good decisions.
You might be an example of that. That you state "I could have written it in a shell script" indicates you don't have the technical competence to be doing such things. Another indicator is that you think the particular application you mentioned would be a great application of LLM technology. It's not, at least not with the current state of large language models, but that it might seem to be within MSFT is a good example of the difference between technical competence and skills at playing the system.
Every time something new comes along there will be endless numbers of hucksters who glom onto it and who will attempt to leverage the new generation of buzz words for their own profit. That happened when microprocessors revolutionized computing, it happened when Internet revolutionized everything, and it's happening now with the rise of neural network technologies for AI. But the huge amount of noise generated by deliberate fraudsters as well as by well-meaning, but stupid and/or ignorant people doesn't mean the technology is not as powerful as it is.
I agree that most of what is said about AI these days is flat out wrong. Most people simply don't have the technical skills to understand what part of the huge gold rush is nonsense and what is real. But then every technological gold rush has been like that.
Yup, I see it the same way. Algorithms from 40 years ago, neural nets, SVMs, Random Forest and other Decision Trees, won't define the future. In the end, island solutions with thousands of if-else and loop Structures. Having big AGIs won't help either, prone to the same proprietary traits, I am quite interested in how people gonna keep up with that scam. Has nothing to do with real Intelligence. Maybe, just maybe, in 10-20 years, there are some highly convoluted and complex AGIs with a net of Agents which kind of give an resemblance of real Intelligence, maybe.
hey, you only get your US denominated debt paid if the dollars are made available to "enemies of America." No dollars, no repayment. Perhaps some gold or oil will do instead? How about that novel concept: you get something of value for something of value you invested or loaned. Instead of just getting paper dollars backed by nothing but hubris.
Well certainly. ~And given the massive FX swap market that allows you to swap pretty much any currency asset or liability for pretty much any date into or out of dollars, whether Dollars are used for trade is irrelevant.
What counts is what people do with surpluses - drugs crooks, Saudi or exporters like China.
If an alternative to dollars becomes available then sure a new reserve currency may emerge. Until then we can wait till US defaults on its debt - and as long as it keeps approving more debt it won't.
I'm getting a bit bored with telling very bright bloggers who I really respect and appear to get 95% of all stuff right (Simplicius, Martynov, Pepe Escobar) that only Surpluses matter - trade currencies are irrelevant. And that there is no such thing as a Petrodollar, only a Petrodollar market* where ordinary dollars are traded (in Europe, with ME the main supplier of dollars and everyone else net borrowers). They are ordinary dollars and get settled at NY banks.
I sometimes wonder whether people with only STEM degrees and advanced mathematics will ever be able to understand basic finance.
*By Petrodollar or Eurodollar we mean Money Market Dealing rooms that have been set up or transferred to Europe closer to some customers, but still trading dollars that settle in NY.
El problema con ese excedente no sería que se utiliza en lavado de dinero, comprando artículos de lujo, o en mayor medida en inversiones de riesgo destinadas al mercado de valores que generan más dólares sin respaldo en vez de volcarse a procesos productivos?
Cómo ejemplo en mí país está lleno de "criptobro" que obtienen dinero fácil de actividades semi legales o juicios/herencias y lo invierten cripto esquemas ponzi o mercado de valores solo para tener un éxito fugaz
Bitcoin market cap is meaningless though for anything except bitcoin holders - and even then a huge percentage of it is literally lost (i.e. bitcoin wallets and addresses that cannot be accessed anymore).
The USD bond market, however, generates trillions of dollars of interest income plus a big chunk of these bonds exist because they are liabilities attached to real things like commercial real estate, residential real estate, Social Security capital (the biggest one), etc etc.
"If an alternative to dollars becomes available then sure a new reserve currency may emerge." Its already there, there is more and more trading without the involvement of Dollars, in the currencies of the two trading partners or in Yuan. And that development is going on for 2 years and it will accelerate. So the Dollar is already loosing ground, aka inflation. Less Dollars traded, interest rates of the FED go up because they want to sell their state loans/debt which are directly correlated to the printing of the Dollar, less Dollars traded, interest rates of the FED go up, you get the gist, a loop to the death, aka hyperinflation.
The FED already bought up stocks, bought up its own state debt/loans, the deadly sin of having a currency, I repeat, the deadly sin of fiat currencies. Now we have imho a new phenomenon, the Western bloc is huge, 1 billion people, 40-50 nations, huge resources. So the whole broke thing, could go on for a while. But in the end, the bubble will burst. It doesn't matter how much you or others believe in trade surplus or don't believe in trade surplus. Money is always a psychological factor also, if inflation goes on, and looking at the morons in the West who call the shots it seems it will go on, when will the psychology of Western people get a dent? Gold goes up all the time, people know whats happening, well at least 10-20% of the population who are not believing in the monetary tooth fairy like you or others at least.
Nobody cares about the trading currency - it is the currency surpluses that develop after trade that create FX pressure up or down.
We could all decide to trade everything in buttons. Electronic buttons registered at some central bank. So long as there is an easy way to exchange buttons into any other currency it really wouldn't make any difference at all.
What happens is what those with the surplus buttons do with them. And right now in really large quantities there is nothing else you can do but buy dollars.
Heaven help anyone who listens to the gold bugs - they are like Ukrainian warmongers. There is literally no pre-thought going on.
Wrong. the surpluses are the tail end of the trade chain - holding in USD is merely a convenience - not a necessity. Nor do you show any understanding of how actual currency trade occurs - the dollar underpins most of the Western currency trades as well - but increasingly does NOT underpin the Global Majority currency swaps/currency trades.
Wrong. Eurodollar market was $15 trillion a year back in 2015 - and the entire market is printed money used to extend loans for trade, not value of things like fixed assets backing up loans on said assets. The Eurodollar is the largest single part of dollar hegemony in terms on how it benefits the US and Europe.
Stock prices, like everything else, are determined "at the margin." The entirety, 100%, of a Public Corporation, is not traded every day with the "chits" called U.S. dollars. The very same "chits' which the Publicly named, but Privately owned, Federal Reserve and click into existence ex nihilo. Commercial Real Estate in the U.S. with prices jacked up to the moon, along with the value of Bonds, have taken $Trillions in losses, most of which has not been disclosed. Enjoy the ride, the bill has come due.
The U.S. economy is the Mirage in the Desert, a churning fiction, of Financialization, of buying up once great businesses, e.g. Boeing and turning them into Corporate Dead-ends.
Banking is a skimming business, of carving off the profits of others, of trading and selling your book to the last sucker. No nation should let their Bankers steer the ship. Ever.
Those markets are buttressed by military power -- in other words Monsato can get it's way in Africa and whatnot or else, and stock price goes up. Military power which is fading/exposed . SMO is doing that. Houthies are doing that.
Not just Trade, Not just Asset Management. The "FX MARKET" as we know it, is a hub-and-spoke structure: every pair trade bw currencies runs through USD as the hub. There is not enough liquidity pairwise unless the transaction goes through the central "collecting" hub (USD).
Govs could easily start bilateral trade, and hasten the demise of Dollar standard if they guarantee future exchange rates on their currency when its' invested/parked after the transaction! That would be a minimum going forwards. I don't know if BRICS are facilitating that or not....b/c think what happens when trade/transactions happen in USD: The user BUYS USD hands over USD to exporter/seller. The seller then parks the USD in a USD Investment product knowing full well at the tail end, he'll get the same USD principal amount back. IF this is to be replicated for arbitrary pairwise currencies, then AT THE LEAST, the parking of the other currency must absolve currency risk to be VIABLE to replace the USD.
"The risk of a collapse in exports and imports will increase by 10-25% in the next six months due to the inability to pay for foreign trade transactions in dollars and euros"
The same foreign trade that the sanctions are supposed to be stopping?
I really dont think anyone will care about getting paid in yuan instead
The fact of the matter is that many ‘developing’ nations need access to commodities; diesel, steel, fertilizer etc. These are things, along with basic machinery, that Russia and China can supply in abundance. But the $USD subsidies to governments coupled with US dollar denominated loans will remain as the final link in the Neo-colonial chains, and the most difficult to break.
Do you have any recommendations/resources (books or articles) to read to go deep into this point? I understand your point but want to do some more research on this.
The vampires are repainting the walls while the pillars crack and are chipped away - readying for a ball even as the building shakes, straight out of an episode of Country House Rescue. The responsain'tbility is jarring.
Throw in Annalena Bareback, Sanna Moron, Slowlaf Scholz... you get the idea.
The modern politicial is the elected bureaucrat, whose success consists of avoiding responsibility while taking credit for success. Success has many parents, but failure is an orphan.
ABSOLUTELY - I couldn't have said it better ... I could add more but what a difference does it make, the clowns like their clown show and will reap their bitter "rewards" from it.
NATO is finding out that Russians are not the coddled crybabies who are all too common in the West...Russian casualties have only increased their desire to crush the sources of their problems, namely the US and NATO....of course, Russian history would have told them that, after the immense casualties suffered in two World Wars did not shake their resolve...But who reads history in the US government...it's so old fashioned !
You know, we have to wonder if the US military suffered the same level of casualties as either the Ukrainian or Russian military, how would it react?
For we know at least, if it were the British army, their entire army would have been eliminated if we used the ukrainian casualties since the British army is so very small...
They are involved, but manning missile systems as opposed to any actual battlefield fighting. As mentioned, if they tried that, it would be decimated within a couple of weeks. It's potentially one of the reasons why Sunak has declared a snap election, he doesn't want to be known as a wartime leader.
Amazing stories., extremely interesting. Thank you Simplicius. We are looking at a whole new landscape and untold possibilities for the whole world. But difficult not to feel sad for all the madness and suffering caused by the wasteful contorsions of the collective West.
That's right. Were it not for borisvirus23, the famous BoJo skunky smells bad and is made Ill by the thought of peace...another scamdemic Harmacide for poor UKraine, no needles necessary. Exactly.
Johnson, is this you? Or perhaps, the “ethnic” ruler of the Kaganat of Nuland, Mr Yermak? It’s hard for some to mentally digest the ideas of conscience and merci. Unlike the zionized owners of the collective west and their obedient compradors, Russians have souls and prefer to avoid wars. Compare Gaza to Kiev.
You completely forgot what was happening in first 2-3 months. We are now constantly talk about serious clobber Ukraine experiencing today, but if you go to Lostarmour and look at losses Ukraine was taking at the start it was horrendous. They were losing materiel at 5-10x rate of now. They lost almost all their airforce. Half of tanks. It was slaughter. Russia were actually using it's "танковый полк прорыва"(tank assault regiment) armies. It was Shock and Awe, as you call it in the West.
If West intervention never happened, it was all over, right there, in Istanbul. Thank BoJo and his masters for shitshow we have now.
He has a function in the full strategy because he can say things that others can’t. I also believe he is genuine in what he says (as in he does mean it) - but this time he said some things that should have better left unsaid.
Putin and Medvedev are just playing "good and bad cop". Putin is good cop, Medvedev is bad. If West doesn't want to agree with good cop, sooner or later they will have to deal with bad cop. Medvedev simply talks to the West in their own unprofessional, rude language, because Western politicians seem to have forgotten what diplomatic etiquette and professionalism are, or they have degraded so much that they can understand only simple everyday language. Medvedev can simply say directly what Putin or other high-ranking Russian politicians cannot say, because this is not diplomatic. But unlike Western clowns, Medvedev usually tells the truth, it’s just that the West has basically not yet gone far enough for Russia to start doing what Medvedev usually talks about, he is only warning them for now. Sometimes, of course, he’s just trolling) And although Medvedev is the deputy head of the Security Council (an institution in the Russian government, which is essentially the main decision-making center), this position does not allow him to make any decisions on his own, so that this immediately has a noticeable impact on actions of Russia. Also, people in Russia usually like what he says, although they don't take it 100% seriously.
You know, Russia may be playing a long game but the West isn't pulling punches. They appear quite united, perhaps in servitude to their masters, but united nonetheless. Money keeps pouring in, unlimited, Russian money will be stolen - the $300bn is as good as gone - and the sanctions DO hurt. And because of that unity, they are able to gang up on countries like Kazakhstan, the UAE, whoever, and bully them into sanctions compliance.
They will come up with more levers to pull, and the cost/benefit works just fine, nobody cares that in the end 2mn Ukrainian men will be dead, as long as Russia is a net loser. The Chinese are kingmakers here but too timid, passive, and in a USD dollar prison of their own.
Yes, EU publics are against this thing but elections long stopped mattering, anyone who thinks the EU is a democracy ought to get in line for bidding for the Kerch bridge, I'll send a link lolz. Europe has given up economic development - its been 2+ years of 0 growth - and was happy to write checks to the US instead and tie the noose around their own neck re: stealing Russian sovereign assets. Sure, rule of law and all that but in the end laws are only as useful as the integrity of the societies that enforce them. The Americans meanwhile with their USD hegemony have issued more debt in the last 2 years than the last 20 or something insane like that, Yes, in the long term; like 20 years, this will hurt them and blow up in their faces but not if they are the only ones left standing.
Many say that the Ukr army will collapse or cease to be able to fight. Clearly in Western capitals they think otherwise, and frankly I'm starting to lean in that direction too. Their supply chain is wide open, the entire military-industrial capacity of the west is being provided to them, unlimited money, ISR, you name it. Yes, here we say "they will run out of men" but if thats the strategy, to literally kill everyone; well look at the Israelis in Gaza.
The BRICS alternative for SWIFT/USD needed to be rolled out yesterday.
The issue with money is though we have been programmed to think it is the solution for all problems it is but a means to an end. The western financial system survives on the faith that the paper can be exchanged for something of value. Also because surplus of paper needs to be stored the west was a trusted place to store accumulated wealth. Those two ideas are being challenged openly today, as trade expands in local currencies western currencies will start to value less and worth less. So like how the cost for artillery shells exploded in the west since 2022 because of increased demand. So there will be the need to have more and more currency chasing less available and quality goods, the mysterious phenomenon referred to as inflation. Now the fact that the west has clearly demonstrated that storing wealth in the form of western debt is not safe because they can just choose to not repay those debts, countries will be less inclined to purchase western debt for wealth storage. Lots of debt will be issued as western investment entities will chase yields in the form of western government treasuries. So in the end if a default comes who best to be left holding worthless paper but the people who issue the paper? Crabs are boiled in cold water that is gradually heated, as if they are dropped in boiling water, all the legs fall off. So the water is gradually heated, there comes a point when the water temperature is perfect before it gets hot to the point of being fatal. A sudden death is better than waiting and praying to die because the suffering becomes unbearable and seem never ending.
I agree with everything you wrote - but what you're describing takes TIME to have an effect. Election cycles take years, and it seems we need 2 elections cycles nowadays for anything to happen, if anything does ever happen. So, a decade? Then the $ matter; yes the vulnerability is obviously there but countries that rely on USD: China, all the Gulf countries, India, etc are just as vulnerable.
Most of us here are $ denominated individuals whether we like it or not, and I'm the first to admit it. I think every day about how much of my life happens because of some pass-thru in NY or DC, and what would change if I became a sanctioned individual. I'd be screwed. And that scales up to small and medium businesses, countries, you name it. The power is real and in many cases its not like the USD was imposed on anyone, countries took it up and used it as the excellent tool that it was - and IT WAS excellent; because past administrations had the wisdom to never shoot the golden goose. Yes they are making a massive error now, but thats the gamble - if it works, it will usher in another century of dominance.
Well it may take time or it may not the issue is without full information we are unable to see how serious the cracks are, or how secure is the structure may be. Faith is fickle and the perception of value is based on faith. The countries you mentioned are vulnerable because they don't want to lose their accumulated wealth, even though it is held in debt, but it is their blood and sweat difficult to give up, even if the individuals in power did not bleed or sweat for that wealth. The issue for those nations going forward is will they risk present and future earnings in the same scheme? So would throwing good money after bad recoup what is basically already lost? The Saudis have been branded terrorists and human rights offenders for decades. So would the world bat an eye if there sovereign wealth is frozen? So the powers that be are securing what they hold and future earnings in a perceived alternative. Who knows what the future holds? but change is inevitable it maybe good it maybe bad all we can do is seek to understand what comes, prepare as best we can seek opportunities and hope for the best. As in the end no man controls the grand plan.
Very good observation re: Saudi sovereign wealth funds suddenly having their assets frozen. Even if the $ are held in Saudi banks, nothing happens without NY Fed clearing
Saudi Arabia has the second largest gold reserve held in the US, well of what is made public. Which country actually holds dollars? In the end the dollar is a depreciating entity because of the continuous creation of new dollars/debt. The only place the dollar is legal tender is in the US. So to maintain value, the wealth is held in treasuries to gain interest and in turn protect the value of the dollars. The western world has made debt the most valuable asset, and in extension a ball and chain for the developing world.
So, is that gold held in the US held in trust, or held as a hostage?
The Saudis probably made that decision back in the 80's right after the Iranian revolution because they were afraid of holding it in kingdom. 45 years later... its their gold, but is it?
I feel the same way about my own money btw. I have cash in various accounts - Euro, GBP, USD, and not small amounts, and every single day I am well aware that it can be taken away from me on a whim. Maybe paranoid - I'm nobody - but still.
I don't know how old you are, but guessing based on your comment I assume... Ask those Germans from the 1920+ era, if there are any still around ... apart from that it can be deduced, assuming honesty and analytical rigor, by looking beyond THE DECEPTION instead of operating out of one's own MENTAL PRISON CAVE.
But obviously your mind has been soaked in the poisonous gospel of THE FIAT CURRENCY CULT! It's a vampire ball where the clocks have no hands.
With all respect, I don,t agree. In my opinion The West has put almost all of its cards on the table.
Financially, the last leftovers are put together. They went all in. The Russians and Chinese have many assets at hand. The chess and go masters play in other dimensions and on other levels. The EU is almost completely dependent on China. Medicines are mainly produced in the East. Essential parts and products come from the East. Russia has the grain, the land and essential raw materials, China the means of production and there is enough knowledge and manpower. When Russia turns off the gas tap, the candles have to be on in Europe.
They have absolutely put their cards on the table. Yet, Russia still exports gas to them, still exports metals and minerals, and basically still plays in whatever sandbox they let them in. Russia is allowing the Europeans to fight the economic battle on their terms. Sanctions? They have issued hundreds of exemptions - Russians go along with it. Same on the military side. Russia sails some ships to Cuba and threatens to send weapons to hot zones. Please - Ru knows US tolerance for casualties is nearly nil and any news of dead Americans would escalate quickly, and they don't want to deal with that.
Ukraine has lost an estimated 500 thousand men in the Russia/Ukraine conflict and Ukraine has resorted to enlisting women in the military. Ukraine cannot last much longer without an effective fighting army, so don't rule out Russia yet, Russia holds the moral high ground and is winning the conflict against Ukraine regardless as to how much the West and America throw at Ukraine. The West have to take the conflict to Russia and Russia being twice the size of America, Russia can absorb the blows. And don't forget, that the Satanic West has been trying to effect "regime change" in Russia since Vladimir Putin became President/Prime Minister of Russia in 1999, and don't ignore the significance of the landslide victory President Putin won in the recent Russian elections or the fact that President Putin will have made contingencies for the Ukraine conflict which has its origins in 2014 following the Western organised coup in Ukraine the put Zelensky into power.
Zelensky carried out a bombing and shelling campaign against the Donbas and Donetsk regions of Ukraine which are both highly pro Russian and Russia did nothing for eight years until Putin said enough is enough, and over 30 thousand people from the Donbas and Donetsk region perished as a consequence of the bombing and shelling.
The Satanic West used the Russian intervention into Ukraine as a pretext for accusing Russia of launching an unprovoked attack on Ukraine, but the Ukraine conflict was engineered by America primarily to get rid of Vladimir Putin and to remove Russia as a rival to the American Empire. All America and the Satanic West can do is desperately try to prop up their proxy in the hope of defeating Russia.
"... which has its origins in 2014 following the Western organised coup in Ukraine the put Zelensky into power."
I was surprised to come across a ss article, Rurik Skywalker I believe, where it is documented that this conflict is a remnant of WWII and the ensuing Cold War. And fasten your seat belt, who do you believe is one of the string pullers ... one of the Dulles brothers, by "vouching" for one of the crooks, Lebed I believe was his name compatriot of Bandera, as being crucial to have a save haven in the US in order to carry out operations in UA against USSR ... every time you believe you have found all the skeletons an even bigger heap appears.
THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN is so all encompassing and entrenched in the global system that nothing doesn't surprise me anymore. Even the possibility of VVP being in cahoots with the opposition/enemy doesn't seem outside the realm of possible anymore.
Not the living Ukrainian men and women. People have been trying to fight the snatchers. There are plenty recorded cases. As for the “ethnic” Kievan junta, it indeed cares about gesheft only and is ready to accept any numbers of dead soldiers to keep the money spigot working.
Yep, the Jew Volodymyr Zelensky and his cronies are prepared to continue the conflict in Ukraine to the last Goyim, but the shit Zelensky would not be seen dead near a battle field. Maybe Zelensky thinks he can defeat Russia with a few Battalion's of women because of the dire manpower shortage, young men in Ukraine are literally being press ganged into the military and the simpleton dementia Joe Biden believes America and the West {NATO} can defeat Russia, but that is what the collective West has, a former comedian who couldn't punch his way out of a wet paper bag and a senile old man who apparently has the habit of soiling his pants who represent the collective aspirations of the West and NATO against Russia. I bet that Vladimir Putin's latest peace offer will be completely dismissed by America and the Satanic West who only want death and destruction for $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
the whole 'stolen money' thing - this was described many times already. there are really only three scenarios
A. all for all swap. we take whatever we can get our hands on and you take whatever you can get your hands on. Given that RU controls over a trillion of assets associated with the 'west' that are factories , plants, etc , this is BY FAR most favorable scenario for Russia.
B. negotiated 'X amount of X amount' swap. more neutral. we take 300 Bln (or whatever we claim) and you take the same amount, we swap the assets and go ahead on our merry ways.. However this requires 'negotiating with Putin'.
C. Full undo of sanctions, we release what we hold (and pay earning and interest) and you do the same. This is by far the LEAST favorable scenario to Russia however RU was stating they were willing to consider it.
So A, B, or C.
Right now USA and its vassals going ahead on path A which is the worst for the 'west', EU in particular. Russia gets to profit enormously from that, gets to play 'victim' and full support/sympathy of Global Majority (aka The Rest of the World) . and EVERY non-US satellite then says, if they could do this to Russia, what will we do if/when in their desperation they do it to us?? Very favorable to Russia. Changing direction to either B (which could be reasonable) or even C is unlikely due to total refusal to think while being blinded by ideology within US puppets..
The zionized “west” cares not about the opinions of Global Majority because Usurers ( the owners of the collective west) have never been punished for any misdeeds, however bloody and tragic for the millions of people. Their supremacist mentality is beyond the rules of dignity. See the Ghaza genocide and the Nazification of Ukraine.
" there is nothing scary about breaking through that mental barrier of imposed colonial slavery and financial hegemony" ??? Nuclear war isn't scary? The Rothschilds, Great Britain, France, and the US are old hands at war to keep the banks from going broke. They and their countries will go broke if they don't push back against BRICS. Yes, you can kill every Ukrainian Slav or Jew and you will not have touched the enemy. The security people around here thought there would be a nuke war four years ago. Even more likely now. I just don't see the Rothschilds and Fed and security forces tied to the Wolfowitz Doctrine of not letting Russia or China rise up to challenge the hegemon. Rumor has it that they are actually trying to destroy the dollar to bring in crypto dollars.
Very reasonable assessment compared to the prima facie fallacies - the only problem being that THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN/MAKE BELIEVE/ MONEY is so ensnared in its own WEB OF LIES due to which every - with continually changing members - faction fighting for its own winner takes all exit - by varying degrees.
So, what if all the debtors refuse to repay? Bankrupt or plain refuse to reapy, just what will the hegemony do? Fight everyone? Issuing debt is little more than mobster style protection rackets, destined to be doomed. The US is fighting a good fight but doesn't have the legs to see this out. I am sitting back with a beer watching this whole shit show with interest.
I doubt the west has the unity to preserve long war costs and coffins coming home. Currently, italy and france are at odds. Germany, which is the industrial engine of Europe, has been economically eviserated. Europe is the leading edge of a global recession.
And America had no manufacturing capacity.
Russian debt to gdp is 21% and has a trade surplus.
I know. The Russians are playing a great game, scoring lots of goals. But it really pales in comparison to the goals that the west is scoring against itself.
The US is losing, but that's fairly minor compared to the fact that it's committing suicide on the field.
Transcript of Meeting (of President Putin) with the leadership of the Russian Foreign Ministry... via Kremlin.ru, in russian.
http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/74285
The vast amount of frozen assets is in Europe, with only around $5 billion in the US. From what I understand the latest scheme is to get Europeans to seize the money and transfer it to the United States. The assumption here is that the risk falls on Europeans only. It will be interesting to hear what ECB and Euroclear have to say.
He'd also date his daughter too....
If he axes the income tax and replaces it with higher tariffs, we'll all be free to move overseas and leave our remaining Americans with higher priced goods while we enjoy much cheaper goods purchased "pre-tax" so to speak.
If you think Americans will emigrate, you know nothing about Americans.
Yes, I do. And you do not.
I even know enough to understand that anybody who chooses a moniker representing one of the most bloodthirsty anti-American revolutionaries in contemporary history is not an American in any way that matters.
Idiotic idea, worthy of Trump. Simp's the greatest bar none at military analysis and I admire the heck out of him, but a sucker for Right-wing distractions.
So you worship the potato?
Trade is only a small portion of USD usage. The entire Eurodollar structure in place is for ASSET management. Just look at those multiple trillion dollars corp like NVDA, MSFT and AAPL etc. They attract capital from all over the world including from China. Chinese Mom-and-pop is directing money to the US stock market last year and the half. Unless RU+CN wise up and understand that the US is now waging an informational warfare with attracting capital with this Artificial Intelligence Narratives, RU+CN ain't winning this war. Also, with the amount of USD denominated debt, you're looking at the USD shooting way up against EUR and JPY before dying its slow death. WWIII revving up would also help attract capital from the EU to park in the US for the foreseeable future.
As you can see from real expert on AI, this AI narrative and LLM is a nothing-burger but just a ploy of these money exchanagers to scoop in as much as possible. https://x.com/Dr_Gingerballs/status/1801394577825534353
Sometimes you'd be surprised. At times when you are so invested into the day-to-day it is possible to miss the big picture
I think you are describing the U.S./EU much more than Russia and China. Just my opinion
Do you agree that “all wars are bankers’ wars?” - That would be a logical result of the U.S. / EU getting the “big picture?”
What country do you live in?
Because that will tell me how it's obvious who is winning the PR war in your country
That's true but the difference is trade is actual physical goods/commodities backed by that coin, whereas your 'assets' are basically thin air given that all those company valuations are just bubbles (NVIDIA etc) as the AI bubble appears to already be peaking or have peaked, particularly with OpenAI now hinting the next iteration won't be anything special (ChatGPT 5, etc.) because LLMs appear to have hit a wall, or rather a ceiling, which you referenced.
How about that coming bill:
"Much of our $35 trillion in national debt is short term, Within 12 months it has to be refinanced at 5% or more. Much of the debt was below 2%, now refinancing at over 5%. Interest payments on the debt are $1.1 trillion per year. Likely to reach $1.5 trillion per year in 2025."
We are looking forward to the next AI winter! ❄️🥶❄️🤖❄️
In my hype-stock winter, people walk around in board shorts & bikinis
Hope so. I am so sick of my friends bragging about their winnings in NVDA, SMCI and AVGO. All led by taiwanese americans. They take those "Enron" tactics to the brim with Coreweave or whatever shit buying up its chips and then collateraling them for more dollars to buy more chips up.
You know what's funny. My high school friend is working in a small mainland chinese bank's branch in HK (Dongguan bank). He is responsible for the treasury department and manage the bank's investing portfolio. And he just bragged about how the bank ONLY invests in US treasuries of different duration and US corp bonds; and has hardly any exposure to any mainland china equity. Lol...
What's your calls on GME looking like? 😂
He said it right. https://justdario.com/2024/06/why-gme-is-not-a-david-vs-goliath-story-but-a-godzilla-vs-kong-one/
This isn't what fintweet makes it to be. Hard to tell at this point. Those involved in naked-shorting GME are also the same folks involved in gamma squeeze those NVDA and Mag3 every damn day, including today. Those BTFD just won't stop. Lol...
He said it right. https://justdario.com/2024/06/why-gme-is-not-a-david-vs-goliath-story-but-a-godzilla-vs-kong-one/
This isn't what fintweet makes it to be. Hard to tell at this point. Those involved in naked-shorting GME are also the same folks involved in gamma squeeze those NVDA and Mag3 every damn day, including today. Those BTFDippers just won't stop. Lol...
The momentum of investing in USD is not going to be easy to break, if at all possible.
That's just wishful thinking.
Nah, fiat money systems need at least semi stable economies, they print money correlated directly to state loans. And almost all Western bloc nations have to much debt. Some debt was always bought up by countries like China or Saudi Arabia, big chunks actually. If the trading in Dollars goes down, and it goes down for the last 2 years, then automatically the value of the Dollar goes down. That's what you already see with high inflation rates in the West. Russia and China don't have those problems.
But the West, the US and its vassals are a big bloc, so it could be, just a possibility, that they somehow manage to survive the next 10-20 years, with 2-5% and 5-10% inflation yearly. But I doubt it, as in The Sun Also Rises from Hemingway said, “How did you go bankrupt?" Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
The debt is to large right now, but of course they could scam their way to another 5, 10 or even 20 years, given the amount of brainwashing and lack of knowledge of the majority of people in the West. Money has always an psychological imprint also. But again, I doubt it, the Elites are frankly to dumb to understand that their clever Russian Asset ploy will work as an absolute catastrophe for their own financial systems.
And all of those great companies like NVIDIA, Google, Apple, well, what, just what if the inflation goes on, the Dollar looses steadily value, and all those big companies also implode on the stock market? Because the stock market value is always just a bet on the future. Because many people are putting their money into the stock market because of the high inflation. Then it goes Boom.
I KNOW that a really accomplished con man/Harvard MBA will always be able to con me or somehow end up profiting from my work... So I avoid any fuckstick trying to sell me a vision of somehow accruing unearned profits and laugh at the idea of investing a single penny more into Wall Street's smoke and mirrors. Sad that the first 40 + years of my working life had a suck of SS "contributions" and the SEP/IRA scam worked on me via financial 'advisors'. Never again. My excess valuta is stored in the form of canned food & shotguns...
https://youtu.be/1JITC1fo2HA?si=5opWDF_t6a42mxpd
Better late than never, Bertie.
Who is Bertie?
I think Simp is joking with you. It sounds like a quote from famous British humourist PG Wodehouse, whose butler Jeeves is always getting master Bertie Wooster out of trouble. Just a guess.
Bertie was an outstanding member of the drone club, so he was seeking to praise you
Obvious sarc/ For the kids in the back...No scam... especially IRAs in US markets they are the best performing in the world? Sure I lost a shit load in 2008 like everyone else but gains more than made up since. We live in a capitalist world best be a capitalist not a worker. I make more retired/mandatory withdrawals than I did working in fact.
@St
The "canned food & shotguns" portfolio is a reference to "Gremlins":
https://youtu.be/1JITC1fo2HA?si=5opWDF_t6a42mxpd
Re: You earn more off IRA than your old day job- Could you provide some statistics showing that doing so well as you describe is at all common?
If you have enough capital in an account, that is actually not that hard to imagine. Most people don't.
@HBI
Judging from anecdotes related to me by those slightly to RATHER older than myself (mid 60s)- "Most people don't" is a restrained but accurate assessment.
Same here, I trust no slick hucksters....haven't for decades. Can't be around them.
Short term debt because I suspect (if you follow Eurodollar discussions and the war for it) that once Euro banks start lowering rates first, the US will have won the dollar ownership wars and ended the Eurodollar system. That just started happening (Europe started cutting rates). Now we finally see unemployment rates starting to jump almost on cue. Hence, now Powell can cut some rates heading into the election. The Europeans decided they were going to lose the war and handed the US an opportunity to help keep Biden in office.
Exactly -- great point about dollar ownership. I would add that the balance sheet state of European banks is MUCH worse than US banks. They were riding that free (zero bout) eurodollar train WAY too long.
I wouldn't put money on Powell cutting rates before the year end. Too many are assuming his non-zero bound interest rate policy (ie Yellen's nemesis) is really about inflation. It's about sucking up all the Eurodollars floating around the world (Euro is not the world currency so you are comparing apples and oranges) under the guise of a response to inflation. He needs to stop the monetary impact of all the shadow off shore US dollar stores. Where do you think all these NGO's (sic) get their access to capital? Which then fund social and economic unrest in the US , not just in the ROW.
People need to remember who creates inflation in the US is it Powell or Yellen's fiscal shit show? Listen to Yellen's wailing-- that is the clue. War is an expensive racket. And how many is Yellen funding or setting up? Cross fingers Treasury can cover/sell all the debt rolling over this year and next. How many more trips will Yellen take to China begging them to buy? How easy is that going to be given the sabre-rattling of Biden and crew?
The purchase of debt is purely for psychological reasons - there is no direct connection between those sales and the ability to finance war.
Inflation is a psychological game in the end, same as boom and bust cycles.
The question is, how long they can finance the war?
Is it peanuts for them, or is it a burden?
I'd look at it this way - every iota of national wealth going to guns can't go to butter. The reduction in butter directly impacts inflation inasmuch as fewer goods are on offer. Perhaps the US financing this thing on the cheap makes more sense in this regard. We give $50bil to the Ukraine and it turns out to be payoffs to US MIC contractors for the most part, and shipment of boneyard vehicles that the US had no intention of using again. So where is the butter impact there? Mostly positive. Save money on mothballing old vehicles.
The inflation in the US is a hangover from COVID, all that paying people to stay home and do nothing. Too much money was injected into the economy and every extra dollar spent on consumer goods causes real inflation. So it's not really related to Ukraine, which is a drop in the bucket.
Now if the nature of the support to Ukraine changes, all bets are off.
Gotta say it's weird, though, for the Treasury Secretary to go to Mexico, as she did in Dec 2023, & shill for continuing the war in Ukraine. Can't miss a tie-in to complex U.S. finances.
She's in Mexico & she's talking not about U.S./Mexico interests but the war in Ukraine--?!!?
Juxtapose that with all the threats against Russia. And on another topic, the ludicrous pushing in media of this anti-semitism agenda to deflect war crimes charges against Israel. Why? Perhaps intel organizations coordinating a response that somehow undoes the loss of power and withdrawal of the US worldwide?
Yellen had a *well-placed* nytimes Op-ed yesterday, normalizing the theft of the interest on Russia's frozen assets[13 June]
>Now we finally see unemployment rates starting to jump almost on cue.
where do you see that?
Latest month's figures went to 3.3%. Not huge, but not inconsequential either. When combined with zero growth in full time employment over the last year and a half, this is very unappealing. The difference between actual wage earners and household survey information is getting important, as many people are now doing multiple part time jobs to make up for the inability to find full time work.
" ... whereas your 'assets' are basically thin air given that all those company valuations are just bubbles (NVIDIA etc) as the AI bubble appears to already be peaking or have peaked, .."
It is way way worse - all these companies (BR, BH, ...) have crossholdings of each other and are on an imaginary upward spiral no one seems to realise - tulip-mania 10.0 if anyone asked me.
Fundamentals have been thrown out of the window a long time ago, if they were ever there considering the fig leaf approach based on the gospel of THE SYNAGOGUE OF MAKE BELIEVE ... all wishful thinking, not only "AI"!
People like Dr Jeffrey Funk and Professor Darius Burschka on LinkedIn and Gary Marcus on Substack and LinkedIn are very interesting on AI and especially AGI. It does seem to be a bubble all right.
Its the newest grift and it like the Green grift isnt very good-- easy to spot the BS.
So is the dollar bust going to happen because of a mass aversion to an overborrowed currency or because of Trade.
Trade is irrelevant. It is where the guys with surpluses keep them. That is all. And keeping them in anything but dollars is really difficult.
There are historical reasons why global trade uses the USD, as well as operational ones. Neither are set in stone and both are well worth working to replace if there is a desire to - which there is now.
Nor is your obvious lack of understanding of international trade, helping your already offbase understanding of dollar supremacy and the end of same - much less the even more egregious lack of understanding of just how dollar supremacy benefits the US.
A simple example: This is the US' M1 money measure
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/m1sl
This is interesting because the Fed decided to try and capture dollars in circulation, outside the US in 2020. As is obvious from the graph - M1 thus went from ~$4 trillion to well over $20 trillion. This matters because this extra $16 trillion is additional US dollar monetary mass by which US money printing can occur with reduced negative effects.
Sure, M1 is not the only measure of money/dollars but it is equally misleading to focus on M2 and other measures because the other ones are much more heavily tied into actual physical assets whose value drives the value of bonds/loans against said assets, not the other way around like in trade.
Surpluses: the whole point of Bretton Woods was to address sovereign surpluses via the mechanism of exchange at the gold window - because everyone understood that such surpluses added enormous international instability. It was the US' abuses under Lyndon Johnson that led the US/Nixon to break the gold window; it was replaced by the US Treasury entirely due to US machinations.
But this grand experiment in the US setting its own currency as "global reserve" is ending. The dollar is not going to disappear but the amount of financial feudalism based parasitism on the Global Majority is shrinking literally every day even as the Global Majority economies outgrow the West.
Who cares about the currency we trade in? It really doesn't matter - and I can't for the life of me understand why you would think that.
What matters is what those with surpluses do with them.
I can only repeat the obvious.
The extent of your ignorance is only growing.
The reason people - particularly in the United States, among othe - care about the denominator currency of trade is because it confers benefits.
Your utter lack of any real world grounding or even apparently any serious effort to understand this space only reinforces the paucity of your thought.
On AI, what is becoming clear is that people with IQ of over 150 can achieve huge workloads using AI (and people with IQ under 130 can't).
It's main role will not to be to replace humans, but to hugely increase the importance of IQ amongst humans. We all know that that means - China wins big time.
Er, I suspect the "high Chinese IQ" theory might be an artifact of poor sampling. The hundreds of millions of rural peasants who are never tested might actually be the same, or lower, than other groups. Since it is only the most driven and highly intelligent who made it to the west, we might only be measuring a highly biased sample, and making an incorrect extrapolation to the whole.
Why do you think they are not tested or do not move into cities and universities all the time.
History of the past 30 years or so is precisely that many many Chinese rural dwellers do go to big cities and do do very well.
The PISA Maths test is run by the OECD and makes a big effort to get a representative sample.
It strongly supports China IQ estimates as being some distance above any other large country.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country
People with IQ over 150 laugh at the idea of the current thing being called "AI".
Sure but those with IQ over 150 & social skills can achieve incredible things bossing humans with IQs of 100-120.
Now they can achieve those things with ordinary AI and they can relax about social skills.
You will find very few people with IQ over 150 bossing humans.
I agree I can find very few here in Europe - but many many more in China where they not only have higher IQs but also very good methods to accelerate the career paths of highly talented people into positions with responsibility.
SuperAnts: slaves with an IQ of 150+
Ever thought that, just maybe, humans would rather figure it out for themselves? After all, Human Intelligence has created Artificial Intelligence.
I will talk to real people rather than bots; I anticipate this is the norm - the manufactured importance of AI is just propaganda.
Moronic.
AI lets bosses micromanage their junior employees. It does absolutely nothing creative or anything else.
You keep saying the same thing as me and calling it moronic. Weird.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle
Never believe salespeople. One of Microsoft's internal requirements for sales is to 'make the market'. And what they mean by that is to create opportunities where none exist mostly by bullshitting people.
LLM-based "AI" is the current bullshit. The stuff is barely usable for actual prose but somehow we are to believe it's going to take over the world. It should seriously be a Turing test for people to read some AI-generated prose and recognize it is not by a human. Only the very dumb will succumb.
Just like believing that anti-semitism is the reason why Israeli genocide is abhorred.
LLM's are running on standard hardware, things might change with Quantum computers, or with the addition of Organoids.
With the latter true consciousness may be possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_organoid
Maybe. It's hard to prognosticate, but I think more thought on how it all works is probably required. Usually our approaches are inadequate when we wait around for the technology to catch up.
LLMs didn't hit a wall. In fact, there's recently been quite a bit of a breakthrough, when someone suddenly realized they don't need to run on float matrix multiplication, but simple ternary logic works fine and is much faster - meaning that everyone has been running LLMs on completely wrong hardware.
But still... LLMs are just bullshit generators and nowhere near any "AI".
What they do quite well though (but they're still far from perfect),
is characterization of the context of the conversation.
That's why they push OpenAI crap to every website, why new computers have NPUs, why suddenly you get features nobody asked for like "Recall" in Windows. They simply offload the spyware to your own computer instead of running everything in massive data centers.
Of course they will tell you your data is not uploaded anywhere. It doesn't need to be. It's analyzed on your own device. It only needs to report a thought crime from time to time.
It's Big Brother turbocharged.
The way I understood USD "dominance" is simply convenience. There is no rule that USD must be used for all trade, its just that USD must be used to buy oil, which everyone needs a lot of, and to do that they need to buy USD.
Since all countries needed to have a supply of USD sitting there waiting to use to buy (OPEC) oil with, rather than buying potentially 100s of other currencies (as was probably the case before the Euro unified all those European currencies) they just traded in the currency that everyone needed to hold a supply of, USD. It was simply convenient.
And if OPEC decide that we no longer need USD to buy oil, then it will still likely take a while before all the countries spend their supply of USD and start thinking about trading in other currencies. If they even do.
But if we're not selling oil to each other there is no need to specify USD. For example, when the company I work for in Australia sells items to companies in New Zealand, we agree to trade in AUD and it is highly likely that NZ already has a supply of AUD and doesn't need to buy any more just for our transaction. And when we sell items to China, we can trade in AUD or Yuan, whatever is convenient for both parties, but since everyone still has USD right now, why not use them up?
Countries are not overtly forced into using USD. However, the US represents an enormous market for the world's exports. For them to sell their goods to American consoomers, they must accept dollars. The trick here is that the dollars they earn through trade overwhelmingly flow back into US treasury notes. So whoever wishes to sell their products to Americans ends up investing back into America anyway. As an unfortunate consequence for Americans, the near infinite demand for treasury notes causes low yields. Low yields makes for an unattractive asset class. Instead, given the Fed mandated inflationary environment, Americans pool their money into real estate and equities (which in reality are all meme stocks whose performance hardly has anything to do with real metrics). The pouring of money into real estate is particularly egregious as it prevents access to the good itself for those who don't already own it.
Yes, this too you're 100% correct. To sell items to the US, the US will pay with USD of course. Since everyone needs USD to use to buy oil, they'll accept them. And the same goes for many other transactions between countries that aren't the US.
The "pooling of money into realestate and equities" is just an excuse for creating additional debt which feeds inflation/growth. All money is debt and it has to get created somehow. Realestate and equities are as good a reason as any.
Economic principles have certainly changed over the past couple of decades. The "traditional" economy that extracted raw materials and transformed them into useful finished goods to sell for profit is no longer the case. Now we just create as much money as we need by growing the pool of debt and use interest rates to govern the debt expansion rate.
I don't know the US figures off the top of my head, but here in Australia we have 2.8 trillion dollars that presently exist in our economy as mortgages. And it just keeps growing.
When you say all money is debt, you mean "all currencies are debt". This is true of all modern paper (fiat).
To quote JP Morgan: Gold is money, everything else is credit. When the USD was backed by gold, it was as good as gold, which is why it became so universal post-WWII, esp in the rebuilding of Europe. Most European countries had shipped their gold to the US for safekeeping prior to 1939, and were in no particular hurry to get it back. Sometime in the 1960s the French got sniffy and started to swap their $$$ for gold. Other countries followed suit, and in 1971 Nixon was forced to close to gold window and stop the drain of US gold reserves. Effectively, he was saying "The US is bankrupt, what you going to do about it?" The answer was ignore it. The world pretended the US was still solvent while the petrodollar system was put in place to support the $$$. Oil therefore replaced gold as the dollar's backing mechanism.
It's obvious that the trillions of debt the US has accrued can never be repaid. It is theoretically possible, yes, and this is why the world pretends it's not a problem. When it reaches the point of no longer possible, things become interesting.
Phillip, I know nothing of these financial manipulations, please tell me when US debt reaches the point of no longer possible. I thought we were long past that number.
It's all a big game of confidence. Theoretically the debt could be paid back over a 30-50 year period, but life would be very rough. In practice, it's not going to be paid back. Historically, all governments in this position have used inflation to manage debt and the USG is doing the same. If enough people lose confidence in the USG's ability to pay back the debt, i.e. a politician speaks the truth, then it's game over.
Sooner or later everybody needs energy, food, and key resources (metals, fertilizers, industrial feedstocks, etc.), as well as the manufactured products created by industry that depends on energy, food, and resources. If you don't have those no amount of financialization will conjure them out of thin air for you.
All that debt in Australia, for example, would not enable people to survive without exports of iron ore and other exports. You can't feed people by trading debt back and forth if nobody has any food.
That's why when push comes to shove, the world can live without financialization, but no one can live without energy, food, resources, and manufactured products.
There is nothing the US creates that the world cannot live without. The US could disappear tomorrow and the world would continue living, because all the energy, food, and resources the world needs Russia can provide, and all the manufactured products the world needs China can provide. The US has fallen so far behind as a provider of energy, food, resources, and manufactured products to most of the world that it is no longer indispensable.
China and Russia, in contrast, have pulled so far ahead as providers of manufactured goods, energy, food, and resources that they now are indispensable to most of the world. Half of the world's countries depend on Russian food or resources (fertilizer to grow food) to avoid food insecurity. The EU is now demonstrating how even wealthy countries who have the best alternative options are discovering that without access to Russian energy they cannot maintain the lifestyles their people expect. They cannot maintain their economies while paying two to four times more for US energy exports.
US consumers also cannot continue consuming from abroad when US sanctions have impoverished them through inflation and higher energy, food, and resource costs. Selling to US consumers is not a factor for Russia, but it is a big factor for China and thus the reason China is investing so intensely into developing Russia as well as the countries of the Global South into big consumers of Chinese manufactured products.
As it is now, most countries do not need to buy anything from the US. They can get all the manufactured goods they want direct from China (which manufactures most "US" branded products in any event), and all the energy, food, and resources they need from Russia. They can use yuan or rubles for those transactions.
Financialized countries that have been hooked on dollars through financial schemes will still need dollars, of course, but such financialization is usually a sign that the country has ceased to be an indispensable provider to the rest of the world. It's usually a sign the country is no longer competitive compared to countries which can still competitively produce manufactured goods or export energy, food, or resources.
Yeah, that's how I see it also. Many Empires in the past then cannibalized their vassals, I think Simplicius said the same a couple of times and in his article here. It's interesting to see how far that will go, for countries like Germany or Japan whose populations are gullible on the whole 'allies' and 'partners' thing, the population will wake up very late, maybe even not at all. The US already swallowed up a lot of big German companies.
I think China and Russia anticipated that for a long time. They obviously knew the bad intentions of the Western blob against them. Of course they knew, they try to get military camps all around them for the last 30 years, despite all the talk of 'friendship'. But they play chess, not checkers like most Western Elites. I think its pretty much over, no trick, scam or something else can help the West anymore, they lost their spot of the geopolitics pyramid to China and Russia. I don't see any angle where they can take the lead in the next 20-30 years. Economically, Militarily, Diplomatically, Infrastructure, Commodities maybe Canada, US, Australia have a lot of resources, otherwise no chance.
that sounds ominous -- if you believe the USD is tops forever, good luck. The USA is so indebted now that it is on a tightrope. And other nations have power over us, as well, with that debt. If the US wants to play hardball, it is going to get a hard one and a fast one back from those we wish to hurt.
we're buying less and less kids. all my American compatriots will know this. The prices at the grocery store for many families is eating into even their small savings -- things are becoming unaffordable. There is economic malaise aplenty at home and abroad and our greed and unwillingness to share power with anybody -- not even our NATO pals -- has led us here. I think we are at the part where the gods have driven America insane before destroying us.
This might interest you
American Affairs Birth rates
https://nitter.poast.org/MoreBirths
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2022/11/capitalisms-overlooked-contradiction-wealth-and-demographic-decline/
Interesting articles. Thanks.
One thing I'd like to mention is the americanaffairs article does not go deep enough - it does not analyze "why" religious societies have higher birthrates and how to exploit that to raise birth rates in a secular society. The secret is that women living in religious societies and regions are "manipulated" by the religion to think that having large family = high social status. For women the pursuit of social status is everything. This is also why women in capitalist societies stop having kids. Capitalist societies convince women that career >>> family and that having a good job = high social status. It's not about the economics of having kids, thats just an excuse to justify it used by those who don't want kids. But if you improve the economic situation, they still mostly don't have kids.
So what do I propose? "Manipulate" young women into thinking that being a house wife and having a large family = glamorous and results in high social status. And make women who have careers become socially ostracized. This will need to be done through media propaganda, where all the glamourous "celeberties" have large families. Also make it illegal to become a celeberity without a large family.
Observe in 20 years, most young women will stop purusing careers and will instead start pursuing families. As the saying goes "change her mood, not her mind"
The bottom line is that agricultural societies have large families because each additional worker has an incremental economic benefit. Post-industrial societies find having children to be a burden rather than an advantage - they have no real economic value and actually reduce your standard of living. Explains those charts perfectly - the very poor and very rich don't have any concerns about protecting their standard of living - social welfare programs and gluts of income make sure of that.
You aren't going to change that easily. Paying women to have kids isn't going to work if strictly defined around the birthing process. There are going to be lots of people who will look at the lifelong returns and still say no.
I'd go with the simplest explanation - that capitalism elevates values or imposes obligations to work consume lead self oriented lives
That other forms of societies or economies, for whatever reasons, tradition or religion - which can be paired - pay less attention to
Women's glamour and everything pertaining appears much more like a by product of capitalism and which is the opposite of family
Scipio's is a brilliant diagnosis and solution, rooted in real human values and not the cold, stunted inhumanity of metrics. Utterly on target.
I note, it would replicate what made the Boomers so rich: investing in hospitals, schools, and baby shoes for all those kids. A healthy society is one that prioritizes and protects safe family formation above all else.
The surplus of the North is eyed greedily by the fecund South; the only thing the world is running out of is White people, that is, the very fountain that created unheralded surplus. Scipio's insight is meant for us, the only people in the world who care about picking up the trash.
Exactly. Really you think the FED mandated the inflationary environment and not Ms. Yellen or Biden-- wars are expensive dont forget
that is the logic. but people still think that history has ended, even vis a vis the dollar. The dollar used to be backed by gold. Now it is backed by nothing. It is silly to think it will hold in competition against serious currencies.
The eurodollar system has nothing to do with the backing of the Euro or the Dollar, or their physical quantities in the monetary system, it's a transactional/banking system that uses those currencies to denominate the value of assets to allow exchange between different countries with different currencies. It's just a faster way of settling transnational trades. So the "problem" isn't just the Eurodollar system, it goes much deeper than that, Ru/Cn would have to crack down on individual financial actors investing in the US stock market.
It's sort of like how the West thought that kicking Russia from the SWIFT system would upend their financial sector, but SWIFT is just a messaging system, it doesn't change the underlying structure of the Russia financial sector. Same with the Eurodollar system, it's just an accounting tool. Banning it wouldn't stop investment in Europe or the US.
"eurodollar" has nothing to do with euros, even though it's mentioned in the name. Eurodollar simply means 'dollars not used in the US'. From investopedia: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/eurodollar.asp
Sure, but it's not just dollars, but anything not in the US that is denominated in dollars. Most of the "dollars" in the eurodollar system only exist on a balance sheet of some bank. This is why there is a war on physical cash and a push for CBDCs. Because almost all of the money is virtual, if people actually withdrew their deposits, the entire house of cards would come tumbling, so they need to prevent you from pulling out. The FED printing press is a fucking joke compared to hoe easily private banks "create" money.
So what do you propose? Is the eurodollar system here to stay and essentially unbeatable? Or can accounting systems be switched if the accountat(s) are viewed as unreliable?
Remarkable that the trading platform may outlast the nation that built it, just as English might outlast England.
Both the global business language and the Eurodollar system (which arose because of the Iron Curtain) are utilities of convenience.
Another allegory could be Microsoft Windows, which became a programmer's standard to write software to.
This is a really good, tough question. I think 'switching the accountant' might be the place to look- but that would mean the BIS itself, if not just the Federal Reserve.
What do you mean, what do I propose? I'm not proposing or objecting to anything, I'm just making a basic observation, which is the Eurodollar system is just a transactional system which allows financial actors to move capital efficiently around the world, by using the dollar as a reserve currency.
And people invest in the American stock market because it offers good returns, not because of the Eurodollar system, although that obviously helps. So until and unless the rest of the world starts sanctioning and cracking down on imvestments flowing into the US, or the US stock market no longer offers the returns that it does now, people will keep pumping money into it.
When push comes to shove, the world can live without financialization, but no one can live without energy, food, resources, and manufactured products.
You don't see that, yet, in the US because the US continues to be a producer of enough energy, food, and resources that shortages do not occur within the US which would make it clear what is real and what is faith in Ponzi schemes. But already outside the US the wrenches the US is throwing into the fungibility gears of the world's financial clearing houses are creating local shortages that are making entire countries less certain they will not be the last one holding the empty bag when the Ponzi scheme music stops.
Countries who want to be competitive in their exports and who do not have the vast wealth inertia to burn up of EU countries cannot depend on overpriced alternatives to Russian energy and resources. Over half of the world's countries are dependent on Russian energy, food, or resource exports to avoid food insecurity. When the US weaponizes the dollar, those countries will find a way to buy the Russian energy, food, and resources they must have with payment in yuan or rubles. They can't buy the energy, food, and resources they must have with NDVA stock denominated in dollars. They also learn the lesson that dollarized assets are dangerous to hold.
In a milder way, but still in a leading edge of catastrophe way, Americans are also starting to experience shortages from lack of US production of real, and not Ponzi, assets: Americans from lower class all the way up through the middle class are experiencing a form of food insecurity in that they can no longer buy the food they would like. As a result of inflation and failure of real incomes to keep up with inflation, even professionals in American can no longer eat steak as often as they would like. They do things like buy whole chickens to cut up themselves at home because that is cheaper than buying pre-packaged chicken breasts and thighs. They can't walk into a supermarket with a printout of their NVDA position at their brokerage house and trade that for a high quality, aged steak.
Before anybody gets too excited about AI being a US thing, keep in mind that AI valuations, whether a bubble or not, all depend on chips that are made in China (according to US law, Taiwan is part of China) and on computers that are made in China. The big valuations of NVDA, MSFT, and so on that have gotten a boost from AI cannot exist without the large server farms that are full of computer systems and chips that are all made in China. No China, no server farms. No server farms, no ChatGPT.
To an increasing degree, the actual design elements of AI, both silicon and software, are also nothing exclusive to the US.
The actual neural net software that powers AI is very simple stuff. There's not much to it, with the value of AI arising from two brute force efforts: the first is the brute force manufacturing in China of hundreds of thousands of computers that get put to work in large server farms, and the second is the brute force "training" of the AI models using data harvested from the world wide web and supported by manual labor working mostly in India.
You could add to that a third brute force component, the electrical energy that powers the hundreds of thousands of computers which run the models. Anybody can buy the computers and chips from China that are needed to run the models, and anybody can download the open source for the models, but not everybody has access to the affordable, reliable electricity that economically competitive mass use of AI requires.
The infrastructure for AI is not all that expensive, either. ChatGPT is what? only a $10 billion or so effort? That's chump change for either China or Russia. But access to vast, unlimited, inexpensive energy to run AI everywhere is not chump change.
So if you want to be an investor who bets on trends going forward instead of what's already happened in the past, the countries best poised to leverage increasing values in AI are those that have the hardware and chips (China) and the energy (Russia) and mass numbers of highly educated IT personnel (China, Russia, and India). Combinations of those countries like any two or all three together will be especially competitive.
LLMs are a game for the dumb/easily persuaded. The fact that Russia and China aren't going overboard in this direction is going to be to their benefit in the end. No digital statistical model is going to emulate intelligence, no matter how much CPU and storage you throw at it.
I despise the use of the term "AI" for it. This is a scam, plain and simple. It's a self-training expert system and has the same limits such expert systems have had since they came into vogue in the 1980s. It's just that the coupling of voice recognition with LLMs has baffled the masses.
The fact that really tells the tale is that the majority of effort in LLMs lately has been in writing filters in the query language to alter the delivered results and cover up the 'hallucinations' that LLMs often have by controlling the nature of the queries to work around the hallucinations.
Edited to add: In short, they are controlling the output by altering based on heuristics because no one understands exactly how the LLMs actually work. In the CS world, you've already lost at that point. See: spam filters, antivirus software. Human-readable LLM output is a field of study, but hasn't come to fruition yet and may not in the first place. Orders of magnitude more expensive cpu-wise than the current illegible stuff.
"The fact that Russia and China aren't going overboard in this direction" Not so. Russia and China have made extensive use of neural networks and LLMs. They're going "all in" on them because of their utility. They're just doing so with much greater expertise than you find in the West, because they have a far larger pool of expertise they can use. Please read the term "they" in the above not meaning centrally planned economies controlling all details but rather in the sense of a very rich and highly decentralized free market economy with many players independently chasing good ideas. The governments just give some very broad incentives, like even lower taxes for IT firms.
Some of the results are gadgety and some of them are extraordinarily practical and revolutionary. For example, the Lancet drone swarms that now loiter and autonomously hunt use neural networks within the swarms to coordinate their attacks. Russia's largest bank, Sber (the name comes from the first syllable of the Russian word for "savings account", so you could call it "Save" in English with a meaning of "invest" overlaid...) has very many neural network / AI projects. For example, they just rolled out a quick, contactless payment method where when a merchant rings up a purchase you just smile at the Sber terminal (a small rectangle on a stand) instead of waving your phone or watch at it, and your smile approves the transaction. It recognizes you and knows when you are smiling. That's gadgety to my taste, but it's highly effective, convenient, and popular. The AI required to with extraordinarily high reliability work as people want while not permitting the million scams that might be attempted is highly nontrivial.
"It's a self-training expert system and has the same limits such expert systems have had since they came into vogue in the 1980s." No. This is completely different technology that 1980's expert systems used. It really is revolutionary. That it is essentially a very simple, brute force thing does not mean it is not totally revolutionary.
"No digital statistical model is going to emulate intelligence" Neural networks are not digital statistical models. That's not how they work. Instead, they work by analogy with how the human brain seems to work. They do end up implementing results in some uses, such as LLMs (large language models) that have a lot to do with statistics, such as the statistics of which words more often appear in various settings, but the underlying machinery of how that's done is a neural network that is roughly analogous to what the brain does.
At the very lowest level, human brain function depends on the sheer brute force interaction of about 90 billion neurons, how they connect to each other and how impulses from one neuron can propagate to others. That's why modern AI models are called "neural networks," because the brain is a very complex neural network, albeit a different type of neural network than what is implemented with chips. The complexity of the brain is much greater than the relatively small number (90 billion is a small number in such brute force things) of neurons because neurons have multiple connections to other neurons and they're not simple on/off devices. Human neurons are analog mechanisms, and not digital mechanisms as in chips. To emulate a single brain neuron using simpler logic structures as found on AI chips you typically need multiple layers of chip "neurons", around seven. But the overall idea is similar.
"no one understands exactly how the LLMs actually work" Not so. People understand very well exactly how LLMs work. Knowing how the thing works is not the same as the practical ability to follow along in each step of the billions of interactions that result in some specific output, such as the generation of a specific word or sentence.
"Human-readable LLM output is a field of study, but hasn't come to fruition yet" Not so. If by "human-readable" you mean, say, English language text that you can read and come away with the impression that a person with good language skills wrote it, well, that's absolutely routine.
That's part of the problem with LLMs in that their ability at language is so extraordinarily good that you often end up with a very persuasive, apparently very knowledgeable conversational partner who tells you lies (what I call "hallucinations").
That LLMs tell lies is not the fault of the LLM, it's the fault of the marketing people who are using LLMs in a lazy way to go beyond the simple creation of correct language to the purported creation of correct technical insights in matters such as programming or medicine. Neural networks are actually a very good approach to generating solutions in matters such as programming or medicine. For example, there are millions of neural networks walking around (we call them "people") who have achieved enough learning to more often than not generate correct solutions to programming or medical problems. It's just that humans often have a "tell" that other humans sense when somebody is opining beyond the edge of their reliable experience, while LLMs tend to be uniformly persuasive and well spoken.
As the businesses backing the bigger LLMs invest into more training for things like programming and medicine, those models will get better at generating more accurate solutions in such areas. They'll still make errors as even human neural networks do, but they'll rapidly get to where they make far fewer errors than most human neural networks do.
By the way, perfectly well spoken LLMs can now be run on your desktop computer with nothing more than a $300 plug in GPU card. You need at least 8 GB of on-card memory but a $300 card will have that and it will open the door to all sorts of LLMs for language generation, image creation, and creation of music that is a lot better than the elevator-music filler that now dominates pop music.
Envision a remote satellite vehicle. Imagine this vehicle is dependent on its sat link for all comms. Envision a lack of personnel at that location who know anything about pointing a dish and getting all the COTS equipment like routers, switches, baseband radios, LoS radios and servers mounted in the vehicle up and running. The lack of personnel is caused by MTOE limitations - they want shooters, not technicians.
This would seem to be a great application of LLM technology. Train up something that knows how to bring everything up and running, and knows how to jiggle things to get it to work. It's not really all that hard. Even forward on the relevant log entries when the connectivity comes back up so that the LLM can be improved. 3 years of effort on producing such an LLM failed miserably. I could have written it in a shell script...but that wasn't what was wanted. Instead my company made many millions off of selling LLM technology to the government to not accomplish this task.
Best part of the whole story - the company was MSFT.
So, i'm not going to make the full appeal to authority saying I used to sell this BS. But I did. And I didn't tell the truth then, but i'll tell the truth now, what we all knew internally. It's not very useful or functional and a good expert system would be better than a trained model. You could audit that...
I hope you don't have much money at stake in this because it's not going to go well over time. I got out of it partially because selling bullshit and assuaging ripped off customers isn't much fun.
As they've said in the business for many years...
"What's the difference between a used car salesman and a software salesman?
- the used car salesman knows when he is lying."
One of the problems MSFT has had over the decades is its very success. When companies enjoy an ocean of money flooding in it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish employees who are competent from those who are very adept at playing the system and presenting themselves well, yet the ones who present themselves well are the ones who get promoted. That has an extremely corrosive effect over the years in many jobs, and not just executive jobs. It's one reason MSFT is famous in tech circles for plodding away doing a poor job at most of what it attempts, but still managing to make huge amounts of money because the Windows monopoly washes away all of MSFT's other sins.
One of the things that makes the effect hard to reduce is that very often it's not based on dishonesty: people sincerely try to do a good job and provide what the system around them seems to want. The result is you get staff and executives who are well liked and who often have outstanding people skills, but they don't have the technical competence to make good decisions.
You might be an example of that. That you state "I could have written it in a shell script" indicates you don't have the technical competence to be doing such things. Another indicator is that you think the particular application you mentioned would be a great application of LLM technology. It's not, at least not with the current state of large language models, but that it might seem to be within MSFT is a good example of the difference between technical competence and skills at playing the system.
Every time something new comes along there will be endless numbers of hucksters who glom onto it and who will attempt to leverage the new generation of buzz words for their own profit. That happened when microprocessors revolutionized computing, it happened when Internet revolutionized everything, and it's happening now with the rise of neural network technologies for AI. But the huge amount of noise generated by deliberate fraudsters as well as by well-meaning, but stupid and/or ignorant people doesn't mean the technology is not as powerful as it is.
I agree that most of what is said about AI these days is flat out wrong. Most people simply don't have the technical skills to understand what part of the huge gold rush is nonsense and what is real. But then every technological gold rush has been like that.
Yup, I see it the same way. Algorithms from 40 years ago, neural nets, SVMs, Random Forest and other Decision Trees, won't define the future. In the end, island solutions with thousands of if-else and loop Structures. Having big AGIs won't help either, prone to the same proprietary traits, I am quite interested in how people gonna keep up with that scam. Has nothing to do with real Intelligence. Maybe, just maybe, in 10-20 years, there are some highly convoluted and complex AGIs with a net of Agents which kind of give an resemblance of real Intelligence, maybe.
I don’t quite understand the role the BIS is playing. If anybody could elucidate?
hey, you only get your US denominated debt paid if the dollars are made available to "enemies of America." No dollars, no repayment. Perhaps some gold or oil will do instead? How about that novel concept: you get something of value for something of value you invested or loaned. Instead of just getting paper dollars backed by nothing but hubris.
Trade is only a small portion of USD usage.
Well certainly. ~And given the massive FX swap market that allows you to swap pretty much any currency asset or liability for pretty much any date into or out of dollars, whether Dollars are used for trade is irrelevant.
What counts is what people do with surpluses - drugs crooks, Saudi or exporters like China.
If an alternative to dollars becomes available then sure a new reserve currency may emerge. Until then we can wait till US defaults on its debt - and as long as it keeps approving more debt it won't.
I'm getting a bit bored with telling very bright bloggers who I really respect and appear to get 95% of all stuff right (Simplicius, Martynov, Pepe Escobar) that only Surpluses matter - trade currencies are irrelevant. And that there is no such thing as a Petrodollar, only a Petrodollar market* where ordinary dollars are traded (in Europe, with ME the main supplier of dollars and everyone else net borrowers). They are ordinary dollars and get settled at NY banks.
I sometimes wonder whether people with only STEM degrees and advanced mathematics will ever be able to understand basic finance.
*By Petrodollar or Eurodollar we mean Money Market Dealing rooms that have been set up or transferred to Europe closer to some customers, but still trading dollars that settle in NY.
El problema con ese excedente no sería que se utiliza en lavado de dinero, comprando artículos de lujo, o en mayor medida en inversiones de riesgo destinadas al mercado de valores que generan más dólares sin respaldo en vez de volcarse a procesos productivos?
Cómo ejemplo en mí país está lleno de "criptobro" que obtienen dinero fácil de actividades semi legales o juicios/herencias y lo invierten cripto esquemas ponzi o mercado de valores solo para tener un éxito fugaz
Bitcoin market Cap today is $1.3 trillion. USD bond market cap (not just government) was $46 trillion in 2021.
These high risk investments get a lot of media coverage but don't amount to too much.
Bitcoin market cap is meaningless though for anything except bitcoin holders - and even then a huge percentage of it is literally lost (i.e. bitcoin wallets and addresses that cannot be accessed anymore).
The USD bond market, however, generates trillions of dollars of interest income plus a big chunk of these bonds exist because they are liabilities attached to real things like commercial real estate, residential real estate, Social Security capital (the biggest one), etc etc.
Yes. My point about Bitcoin.
Your point about Bitcoin is both irrelevant and useless.
Bonds as loans on assets - their value is controlled by the asset, not by the denominator.
This is the opposite of the role of the dollar in international trade.
If you are a finance guy - what you wrote above disqualifies you as any form of expert on the US dollar as trade reserve currency.
"If an alternative to dollars becomes available then sure a new reserve currency may emerge." Its already there, there is more and more trading without the involvement of Dollars, in the currencies of the two trading partners or in Yuan. And that development is going on for 2 years and it will accelerate. So the Dollar is already loosing ground, aka inflation. Less Dollars traded, interest rates of the FED go up because they want to sell their state loans/debt which are directly correlated to the printing of the Dollar, less Dollars traded, interest rates of the FED go up, you get the gist, a loop to the death, aka hyperinflation.
The FED already bought up stocks, bought up its own state debt/loans, the deadly sin of having a currency, I repeat, the deadly sin of fiat currencies. Now we have imho a new phenomenon, the Western bloc is huge, 1 billion people, 40-50 nations, huge resources. So the whole broke thing, could go on for a while. But in the end, the bubble will burst. It doesn't matter how much you or others believe in trade surplus or don't believe in trade surplus. Money is always a psychological factor also, if inflation goes on, and looking at the morons in the West who call the shots it seems it will go on, when will the psychology of Western people get a dent? Gold goes up all the time, people know whats happening, well at least 10-20% of the population who are not believing in the monetary tooth fairy like you or others at least.
NO NO NO.
Nobody cares about the trading currency - it is the currency surpluses that develop after trade that create FX pressure up or down.
We could all decide to trade everything in buttons. Electronic buttons registered at some central bank. So long as there is an easy way to exchange buttons into any other currency it really wouldn't make any difference at all.
What happens is what those with the surplus buttons do with them. And right now in really large quantities there is nothing else you can do but buy dollars.
Heaven help anyone who listens to the gold bugs - they are like Ukrainian warmongers. There is literally no pre-thought going on.
Wrong. the surpluses are the tail end of the trade chain - holding in USD is merely a convenience - not a necessity. Nor do you show any understanding of how actual currency trade occurs - the dollar underpins most of the Western currency trades as well - but increasingly does NOT underpin the Global Majority currency swaps/currency trades.
Wrong. Eurodollar market was $15 trillion a year back in 2015 - and the entire market is printed money used to extend loans for trade, not value of things like fixed assets backing up loans on said assets. The Eurodollar is the largest single part of dollar hegemony in terms on how it benefits the US and Europe.
Stock prices, like everything else, are determined "at the margin." The entirety, 100%, of a Public Corporation, is not traded every day with the "chits" called U.S. dollars. The very same "chits' which the Publicly named, but Privately owned, Federal Reserve and click into existence ex nihilo. Commercial Real Estate in the U.S. with prices jacked up to the moon, along with the value of Bonds, have taken $Trillions in losses, most of which has not been disclosed. Enjoy the ride, the bill has come due.
The U.S. economy is the Mirage in the Desert, a churning fiction, of Financialization, of buying up once great businesses, e.g. Boeing and turning them into Corporate Dead-ends.
Banking is a skimming business, of carving off the profits of others, of trading and selling your book to the last sucker. No nation should let their Bankers steer the ship. Ever.
Those markets are buttressed by military power -- in other words Monsato can get it's way in Africa and whatnot or else, and stock price goes up. Military power which is fading/exposed . SMO is doing that. Houthies are doing that.
Not just Trade, Not just Asset Management. The "FX MARKET" as we know it, is a hub-and-spoke structure: every pair trade bw currencies runs through USD as the hub. There is not enough liquidity pairwise unless the transaction goes through the central "collecting" hub (USD).
Govs could easily start bilateral trade, and hasten the demise of Dollar standard if they guarantee future exchange rates on their currency when its' invested/parked after the transaction! That would be a minimum going forwards. I don't know if BRICS are facilitating that or not....b/c think what happens when trade/transactions happen in USD: The user BUYS USD hands over USD to exporter/seller. The seller then parks the USD in a USD Investment product knowing full well at the tail end, he'll get the same USD principal amount back. IF this is to be replicated for arbitrary pairwise currencies, then AT THE LEAST, the parking of the other currency must absolve currency risk to be VIABLE to replace the USD.
They are using multimodal LLMs as a way to project NSA across the globe.
Utterly wrong.
LLM derived breakdowns and summaries of that post by Simplicius The Thinker:
https://open.substack.com/pub/complexiathesinker/p/llm-over-petrodollar-dead-rumors
https://economicconfidential.com/2024/06/oil-sales-saudi-arabia-dumps/. and. https://www.gulf-insider.com/saudi-arabias-petro-dollar-exit-a-global-finance-paradigm-shift/
"The risk of a collapse in exports and imports will increase by 10-25% in the next six months due to the inability to pay for foreign trade transactions in dollars and euros"
The same foreign trade that the sanctions are supposed to be stopping?
I really dont think anyone will care about getting paid in yuan instead
The fact of the matter is that many ‘developing’ nations need access to commodities; diesel, steel, fertilizer etc. These are things, along with basic machinery, that Russia and China can supply in abundance. But the $USD subsidies to governments coupled with US dollar denominated loans will remain as the final link in the Neo-colonial chains, and the most difficult to break.
Pay for imports using a BRICS currency, and buy gold with surplus USD.
Do you have any recommendations/resources (books or articles) to read to go deep into this point? I understand your point but want to do some more research on this.
The vampires are repainting the walls while the pillars crack and are chipped away - readying for a ball even as the building shakes, straight out of an episode of Country House Rescue. The responsain'tbility is jarring.
https://argomend.substack.com/p/responsaintbility
This was supposed to be for tomorrow, but I put it out early for this comment. :)
Ursula the wonder lying and Just one turdoe came to my mind reading your comment. I wonder why? ;-)
Throw in Annalena Bareback, Sanna Moron, Slowlaf Scholz... you get the idea.
The modern politicial is the elected bureaucrat, whose success consists of avoiding responsibility while taking credit for success. Success has many parents, but failure is an orphan.
ABSOLUTELY - I couldn't have said it better ... I could add more but what a difference does it make, the clowns like their clown show and will reap their bitter "rewards" from it.
Such is life. Best to just get on with one's own.
But only in THE HUMBLENESS OF TRUTH!
Your ss name seems a reasonable (for lack of a better word) start, but there is more to it than what meets the eye ...
I try random shit with no background or expectation of success and see what sticks. That's it. :)
NATO is finding out that Russians are not the coddled crybabies who are all too common in the West...Russian casualties have only increased their desire to crush the sources of their problems, namely the US and NATO....of course, Russian history would have told them that, after the immense casualties suffered in two World Wars did not shake their resolve...But who reads history in the US government...it's so old fashioned !
You know, we have to wonder if the US military suffered the same level of casualties as either the Ukrainian or Russian military, how would it react?
For we know at least, if it were the British army, their entire army would have been eliminated if we used the ukrainian casualties since the British army is so very small...
Faux titanium used in failing Boeing commercial airliners: no professionals seemed able to detect this in-house
I had thought the issue was 9999 fine instead of 999 - but I probably misread it.
This is why the British Army is not involved in the conflict!
They are involved, but manning missile systems as opposed to any actual battlefield fighting. As mentioned, if they tried that, it would be decimated within a couple of weeks. It's potentially one of the reasons why Sunak has declared a snap election, he doesn't want to be known as a wartime leader.
Amazing stories., extremely interesting. Thank you Simplicius. We are looking at a whole new landscape and untold possibilities for the whole world. But difficult not to feel sad for all the madness and suffering caused by the wasteful contorsions of the collective West.
Alexander Mercouris states that the interest in the stolen Russian fundies is like 3 billion a year I guess he is saying
He also stated that the SMO would only last until the end of April in February 2022.
do not feed the funny guy
That's right. Were it not for borisvirus23, the famous BoJo skunky smells bad and is made Ill by the thought of peace...another scamdemic Harmacide for poor UKraine, no needles necessary. Exactly.
Looks like I've touched a nerve with his fanbois, una vita dura...
No. You touched our olfaction system with your stinky judeo-banderite memes
Johnson, is this you? Or perhaps, the “ethnic” ruler of the Kaganat of Nuland, Mr Yermak? It’s hard for some to mentally digest the ideas of conscience and merci. Unlike the zionized owners of the collective west and their obedient compradors, Russians have souls and prefer to avoid wars. Compare Gaza to Kiev.
You completely forgot what was happening in first 2-3 months. We are now constantly talk about serious clobber Ukraine experiencing today, but if you go to Lostarmour and look at losses Ukraine was taking at the start it was horrendous. They were losing materiel at 5-10x rate of now. They lost almost all their airforce. Half of tanks. It was slaughter. Russia were actually using it's "танковый полк прорыва"(tank assault regiment) armies. It was Shock and Awe, as you call it in the West.
If West intervention never happened, it was all over, right there, in Istanbul. Thank BoJo and his masters for shitshow we have now.
Oh shoot!
Medvedev LITERALLY went biblical on them 😮 😉
Medvedev, no different than western politicians - a lot of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing. I wish he would just shut up!
He has a function in the full strategy because he can say things that others can’t. I also believe he is genuine in what he says (as in he does mean it) - but this time he said some things that should have better left unsaid.
The Bible reference though was epic 😂
Putin and Medvedev are just playing "good and bad cop". Putin is good cop, Medvedev is bad. If West doesn't want to agree with good cop, sooner or later they will have to deal with bad cop. Medvedev simply talks to the West in their own unprofessional, rude language, because Western politicians seem to have forgotten what diplomatic etiquette and professionalism are, or they have degraded so much that they can understand only simple everyday language. Medvedev can simply say directly what Putin or other high-ranking Russian politicians cannot say, because this is not diplomatic. But unlike Western clowns, Medvedev usually tells the truth, it’s just that the West has basically not yet gone far enough for Russia to start doing what Medvedev usually talks about, he is only warning them for now. Sometimes, of course, he’s just trolling) And although Medvedev is the deputy head of the Security Council (an institution in the Russian government, which is essentially the main decision-making center), this position does not allow him to make any decisions on his own, so that this immediately has a noticeable impact on actions of Russia. Also, people in Russia usually like what he says, although they don't take it 100% seriously.
Amazing read, as usual. I was a little disappointed that the UNIT fractal monetary ecosystem white paper was not mentioned.
https://wp.unitfoundation.org/
There are many things to consider.
You know, Russia may be playing a long game but the West isn't pulling punches. They appear quite united, perhaps in servitude to their masters, but united nonetheless. Money keeps pouring in, unlimited, Russian money will be stolen - the $300bn is as good as gone - and the sanctions DO hurt. And because of that unity, they are able to gang up on countries like Kazakhstan, the UAE, whoever, and bully them into sanctions compliance.
They will come up with more levers to pull, and the cost/benefit works just fine, nobody cares that in the end 2mn Ukrainian men will be dead, as long as Russia is a net loser. The Chinese are kingmakers here but too timid, passive, and in a USD dollar prison of their own.
Yes, EU publics are against this thing but elections long stopped mattering, anyone who thinks the EU is a democracy ought to get in line for bidding for the Kerch bridge, I'll send a link lolz. Europe has given up economic development - its been 2+ years of 0 growth - and was happy to write checks to the US instead and tie the noose around their own neck re: stealing Russian sovereign assets. Sure, rule of law and all that but in the end laws are only as useful as the integrity of the societies that enforce them. The Americans meanwhile with their USD hegemony have issued more debt in the last 2 years than the last 20 or something insane like that, Yes, in the long term; like 20 years, this will hurt them and blow up in their faces but not if they are the only ones left standing.
Many say that the Ukr army will collapse or cease to be able to fight. Clearly in Western capitals they think otherwise, and frankly I'm starting to lean in that direction too. Their supply chain is wide open, the entire military-industrial capacity of the west is being provided to them, unlimited money, ISR, you name it. Yes, here we say "they will run out of men" but if thats the strategy, to literally kill everyone; well look at the Israelis in Gaza.
The BRICS alternative for SWIFT/USD needed to be rolled out yesterday.
The issue with money is though we have been programmed to think it is the solution for all problems it is but a means to an end. The western financial system survives on the faith that the paper can be exchanged for something of value. Also because surplus of paper needs to be stored the west was a trusted place to store accumulated wealth. Those two ideas are being challenged openly today, as trade expands in local currencies western currencies will start to value less and worth less. So like how the cost for artillery shells exploded in the west since 2022 because of increased demand. So there will be the need to have more and more currency chasing less available and quality goods, the mysterious phenomenon referred to as inflation. Now the fact that the west has clearly demonstrated that storing wealth in the form of western debt is not safe because they can just choose to not repay those debts, countries will be less inclined to purchase western debt for wealth storage. Lots of debt will be issued as western investment entities will chase yields in the form of western government treasuries. So in the end if a default comes who best to be left holding worthless paper but the people who issue the paper? Crabs are boiled in cold water that is gradually heated, as if they are dropped in boiling water, all the legs fall off. So the water is gradually heated, there comes a point when the water temperature is perfect before it gets hot to the point of being fatal. A sudden death is better than waiting and praying to die because the suffering becomes unbearable and seem never ending.
I agree with everything you wrote - but what you're describing takes TIME to have an effect. Election cycles take years, and it seems we need 2 elections cycles nowadays for anything to happen, if anything does ever happen. So, a decade? Then the $ matter; yes the vulnerability is obviously there but countries that rely on USD: China, all the Gulf countries, India, etc are just as vulnerable.
Most of us here are $ denominated individuals whether we like it or not, and I'm the first to admit it. I think every day about how much of my life happens because of some pass-thru in NY or DC, and what would change if I became a sanctioned individual. I'd be screwed. And that scales up to small and medium businesses, countries, you name it. The power is real and in many cases its not like the USD was imposed on anyone, countries took it up and used it as the excellent tool that it was - and IT WAS excellent; because past administrations had the wisdom to never shoot the golden goose. Yes they are making a massive error now, but thats the gamble - if it works, it will usher in another century of dominance.
Well it may take time or it may not the issue is without full information we are unable to see how serious the cracks are, or how secure is the structure may be. Faith is fickle and the perception of value is based on faith. The countries you mentioned are vulnerable because they don't want to lose their accumulated wealth, even though it is held in debt, but it is their blood and sweat difficult to give up, even if the individuals in power did not bleed or sweat for that wealth. The issue for those nations going forward is will they risk present and future earnings in the same scheme? So would throwing good money after bad recoup what is basically already lost? The Saudis have been branded terrorists and human rights offenders for decades. So would the world bat an eye if there sovereign wealth is frozen? So the powers that be are securing what they hold and future earnings in a perceived alternative. Who knows what the future holds? but change is inevitable it maybe good it maybe bad all we can do is seek to understand what comes, prepare as best we can seek opportunities and hope for the best. As in the end no man controls the grand plan.
Very good observation re: Saudi sovereign wealth funds suddenly having their assets frozen. Even if the $ are held in Saudi banks, nothing happens without NY Fed clearing
Saudi Arabia has the second largest gold reserve held in the US, well of what is made public. Which country actually holds dollars? In the end the dollar is a depreciating entity because of the continuous creation of new dollars/debt. The only place the dollar is legal tender is in the US. So to maintain value, the wealth is held in treasuries to gain interest and in turn protect the value of the dollars. The western world has made debt the most valuable asset, and in extension a ball and chain for the developing world.
So, is that gold held in the US held in trust, or held as a hostage?
The Saudis probably made that decision back in the 80's right after the Iranian revolution because they were afraid of holding it in kingdom. 45 years later... its their gold, but is it?
I feel the same way about my own money btw. I have cash in various accounts - Euro, GBP, USD, and not small amounts, and every single day I am well aware that it can be taken away from me on a whim. Maybe paranoid - I'm nobody - but still.
"... to store accumulated wealth. "
What wealth?
" ... on the faith that the paper can be exchanged for something of value."
FIAT CURRENCY PONZI SCHEME ... PAPER CULT!
You can get real things with that paper.
I don't know how old you are, but guessing based on your comment I assume... Ask those Germans from the 1920+ era, if there are any still around ... apart from that it can be deduced, assuming honesty and analytical rigor, by looking beyond THE DECEPTION instead of operating out of one's own MENTAL PRISON CAVE.
But obviously your mind has been soaked in the poisonous gospel of THE FIAT CURRENCY CULT! It's a vampire ball where the clocks have no hands.
With all respect, I don,t agree. In my opinion The West has put almost all of its cards on the table.
Financially, the last leftovers are put together. They went all in. The Russians and Chinese have many assets at hand. The chess and go masters play in other dimensions and on other levels. The EU is almost completely dependent on China. Medicines are mainly produced in the East. Essential parts and products come from the East. Russia has the grain, the land and essential raw materials, China the means of production and there is enough knowledge and manpower. When Russia turns off the gas tap, the candles have to be on in Europe.
The West grayed and the East silvers….
Countdown: Abram 9, 8,7, ......
They have absolutely put their cards on the table. Yet, Russia still exports gas to them, still exports metals and minerals, and basically still plays in whatever sandbox they let them in. Russia is allowing the Europeans to fight the economic battle on their terms. Sanctions? They have issued hundreds of exemptions - Russians go along with it. Same on the military side. Russia sails some ships to Cuba and threatens to send weapons to hot zones. Please - Ru knows US tolerance for casualties is nearly nil and any news of dead Americans would escalate quickly, and they don't want to deal with that.
Ukraine has lost an estimated 500 thousand men in the Russia/Ukraine conflict and Ukraine has resorted to enlisting women in the military. Ukraine cannot last much longer without an effective fighting army, so don't rule out Russia yet, Russia holds the moral high ground and is winning the conflict against Ukraine regardless as to how much the West and America throw at Ukraine. The West have to take the conflict to Russia and Russia being twice the size of America, Russia can absorb the blows. And don't forget, that the Satanic West has been trying to effect "regime change" in Russia since Vladimir Putin became President/Prime Minister of Russia in 1999, and don't ignore the significance of the landslide victory President Putin won in the recent Russian elections or the fact that President Putin will have made contingencies for the Ukraine conflict which has its origins in 2014 following the Western organised coup in Ukraine the put Zelensky into power.
Zelensky carried out a bombing and shelling campaign against the Donbas and Donetsk regions of Ukraine which are both highly pro Russian and Russia did nothing for eight years until Putin said enough is enough, and over 30 thousand people from the Donbas and Donetsk region perished as a consequence of the bombing and shelling.
The Satanic West used the Russian intervention into Ukraine as a pretext for accusing Russia of launching an unprovoked attack on Ukraine, but the Ukraine conflict was engineered by America primarily to get rid of Vladimir Putin and to remove Russia as a rival to the American Empire. All America and the Satanic West can do is desperately try to prop up their proxy in the hope of defeating Russia.
"... which has its origins in 2014 following the Western organised coup in Ukraine the put Zelensky into power."
I was surprised to come across a ss article, Rurik Skywalker I believe, where it is documented that this conflict is a remnant of WWII and the ensuing Cold War. And fasten your seat belt, who do you believe is one of the string pullers ... one of the Dulles brothers, by "vouching" for one of the crooks, Lebed I believe was his name compatriot of Bandera, as being crucial to have a save haven in the US in order to carry out operations in UA against USSR ... every time you believe you have found all the skeletons an even bigger heap appears.
THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN is so all encompassing and entrenched in the global system that nothing doesn't surprise me anymore. Even the possibility of VVP being in cahoots with the opposition/enemy doesn't seem outside the realm of possible anymore.
"Ukraine has lost an estimated 500 thousand men in the Russia/Ukraine conflict and Ukraine has resorted to enlisting women in the military. "
It is true, but it tells us nothing. Ukraine is apparently ready to accept many more dead soldiers.
Not the living Ukrainian men and women. People have been trying to fight the snatchers. There are plenty recorded cases. As for the “ethnic” Kievan junta, it indeed cares about gesheft only and is ready to accept any numbers of dead soldiers to keep the money spigot working.
Yep, the Jew Volodymyr Zelensky and his cronies are prepared to continue the conflict in Ukraine to the last Goyim, but the shit Zelensky would not be seen dead near a battle field. Maybe Zelensky thinks he can defeat Russia with a few Battalion's of women because of the dire manpower shortage, young men in Ukraine are literally being press ganged into the military and the simpleton dementia Joe Biden believes America and the West {NATO} can defeat Russia, but that is what the collective West has, a former comedian who couldn't punch his way out of a wet paper bag and a senile old man who apparently has the habit of soiling his pants who represent the collective aspirations of the West and NATO against Russia. I bet that Vladimir Putin's latest peace offer will be completely dismissed by America and the Satanic West who only want death and destruction for $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
the whole 'stolen money' thing - this was described many times already. there are really only three scenarios
A. all for all swap. we take whatever we can get our hands on and you take whatever you can get your hands on. Given that RU controls over a trillion of assets associated with the 'west' that are factories , plants, etc , this is BY FAR most favorable scenario for Russia.
B. negotiated 'X amount of X amount' swap. more neutral. we take 300 Bln (or whatever we claim) and you take the same amount, we swap the assets and go ahead on our merry ways.. However this requires 'negotiating with Putin'.
C. Full undo of sanctions, we release what we hold (and pay earning and interest) and you do the same. This is by far the LEAST favorable scenario to Russia however RU was stating they were willing to consider it.
So A, B, or C.
Right now USA and its vassals going ahead on path A which is the worst for the 'west', EU in particular. Russia gets to profit enormously from that, gets to play 'victim' and full support/sympathy of Global Majority (aka The Rest of the World) . and EVERY non-US satellite then says, if they could do this to Russia, what will we do if/when in their desperation they do it to us?? Very favorable to Russia. Changing direction to either B (which could be reasonable) or even C is unlikely due to total refusal to think while being blinded by ideology within US puppets..
The zionized “west” cares not about the opinions of Global Majority because Usurers ( the owners of the collective west) have never been punished for any misdeeds, however bloody and tragic for the millions of people. Their supremacist mentality is beyond the rules of dignity. See the Ghaza genocide and the Nazification of Ukraine.
" there is nothing scary about breaking through that mental barrier of imposed colonial slavery and financial hegemony" ??? Nuclear war isn't scary? The Rothschilds, Great Britain, France, and the US are old hands at war to keep the banks from going broke. They and their countries will go broke if they don't push back against BRICS. Yes, you can kill every Ukrainian Slav or Jew and you will not have touched the enemy. The security people around here thought there would be a nuke war four years ago. Even more likely now. I just don't see the Rothschilds and Fed and security forces tied to the Wolfowitz Doctrine of not letting Russia or China rise up to challenge the hegemon. Rumor has it that they are actually trying to destroy the dollar to bring in crypto dollars.
Very reasonable assessment compared to the prima facie fallacies - the only problem being that THE SYNAGOGUE OF SATAN/MAKE BELIEVE/ MONEY is so ensnared in its own WEB OF LIES due to which every - with continually changing members - faction fighting for its own winner takes all exit - by varying degrees.
So, what if all the debtors refuse to repay? Bankrupt or plain refuse to reapy, just what will the hegemony do? Fight everyone? Issuing debt is little more than mobster style protection rackets, destined to be doomed. The US is fighting a good fight but doesn't have the legs to see this out. I am sitting back with a beer watching this whole shit show with interest.
I agree with you.
It does not matter what the population want.
USA/EU is capable of escalation.
They can do anything, they have no constraints.
Russia cannot really hurt them.
A "war of no rules," as Medvedev said [in one of his truculently foamy moods.]
I doubt the west has the unity to preserve long war costs and coffins coming home. Currently, italy and france are at odds. Germany, which is the industrial engine of Europe, has been economically eviserated. Europe is the leading edge of a global recession.
And America had no manufacturing capacity.
Russian debt to gdp is 21% and has a trade surplus.
"the entire military-industrial capacity of the west is being provided to them"
What industrial capacity? The last two years of the smo has consumed 20 years worth of this industrial capacity.
G-7 Suicide on the Installment Plan.
even last year, all 7 heads of state had <50% approval ratings. It's been a joke for a while now.
I know. The Russians are playing a great game, scoring lots of goals. But it really pales in comparison to the goals that the west is scoring against itself.
The US is losing, but that's fairly minor compared to the fact that it's committing suicide on the field.