The Almighty Federal Reserve Dollar Is In Peril As The Global ‘De-Dollarization’ Trend Accelerates

The Almighty Federal Reserve Dollar Is In Peril As The Global ‘De-Dollarization’ Trend Accelerates

by MICHAEL SNYDER | ECONOMIC COLLAPSE | JULY 7, 2014

Prominent international voices are starting to question why the U.S. dollar should be so overwhelmingly dominant. As the Obama administration continues to alienate almost everyone else around the entire planet, an increasing number of prominent international voices are starting to question why the U.S. dollar should be so overwhelmingly dominant in global trade. In previous articles, I have

discussed Russia’s “de-dollarization strategy” and the fact that Gazprom is now asking their large customers to start paying in currencies other than the dollar. But this is not just a story about Russia any longer. As you will read about below, China and South Korea have just signed a major agreement to facilitate trade with one another using their own national currencies, and even prominent French officials are now talking about the need to use the dollar less and the euro more. John Williams of shadowstats.com recently said that things have never “been more negative” for the U.S. dollar, and he was right on the mark. The power of the almighty dollar has allowed all of us living in the United States to enjoy an extremely high standard of living for decades, but as that power now fades it is going to have profound implications for the U.S. economy. In future years the value of the dollar will go down substantially, all of the imported goods filling our stores will become much more expensive, and it is going to cost the federal government a lot more to borrow money. Unfortunately, with the stock market hitting all-time record highs and with the mainstream media endlessly touting an “economic recovery”, most Americans are not paying any attention to these things.

French oil giant Total is one of the largest energy companies in the entire world. On Saturday, Total’s CEO made an absolutely stunning statement. According to Reuters, he told reporters that there “is no reason to pay for oil in dollars”…

“Doing without the (U.S.) dollar, that wouldn’t be realistic, but it would be good if the euro was used more,” he told reporters.

“There is no reason to pay for oil in dollars,” he said. He said the fact that oil prices are quoted in dollars per barrel did not mean that payments actually had to be made in that currency.

If Gazprom’s CEO had made such a statement, it would not have really surprised anyone. But this came from a high profile French CEO. A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for him to say such a thing. Wars have been started over less. Virtually all oil and natural gas around the planet has been bought and sold for U.S. dollars since the 1970s, and this is an arrangement that the U.S. government has traditionally guarded very zealously. But now that Russia has broken the petrodollar monopoly, the fear of questioning the almighty dollar appears to be dissipating.

And at this point even French government officials are not afraid to publicly discuss moving away from the U.S. dollar. Just check out what French finance minister Michel Sapin said to the press this weekend…

French finance minister Michel Sapin says “now is the right time to bolster the use of the euro” adding, more ominously for the dollar, “we sell ourselves aircraft in dollars. Is that really necessary? I don’t think so.” Careful to avoid upsetting his ‘allies’ across the pond, Sapin followed up with the slam-dunk diplomacy, “This is not a fight against dollar imperialism,” except, of course – that’s exactly what it is… just as it was over 40 years ago when the French challenged Nixon.

So why are the French suddenly so upset?

Could it be the fact that we just slapped the largest bank in France witha nearly 9 billion dollar fine?…

The remarks come a week after Paris-based bank BNP Paribas (BNP) SA was slapped with a $8.97 billion fine by U.S. authorities for transactions carried out in dollars in countries facing American sanctions. The fine spurred debate in France about the right of the U.S. in extending its regulatory reach beyond its borders.

This is yet another example of how the Obama administration is alienating friends all over the globe.

In fact, there doesn’t seem to be anyone that the Obama administration is afraid of crossing. Just a couple of days ago, the German press exploded in outrage when Germany arrested a U.S. spy. Why we feel the need to spy on our friends is something that I will never figure out.

And of course our relations with Russia are probably the worst that they have been since the end of the Cold War at this point. And as the Russians now rapidly move away from the U.S. dollar, they seem intent on bringing the rest of “the BRICS” with them. The following is a short excerpt from a recent Voice of Russia article entitled “BRICS morphing into anti-dollar alliance“…

However, in her discussion with Vladimir Putin, the head of the Russian central bank unveiled an elegant technical solution for this problem and left a clear hint regarding the members of the anti-dollar alliance that is being created by the efforts of Moscow and Beijing: “We’ve done a lot of work on the ruble-yuan swap deal in order to facilitate trade financing.

I have a meeting next week in Beijing,” she said casually and then dropped the bomb: “We are discussing with China and our BRICS parters the establishment of a system of multilateral swaps that will allow to transfer resources to one or another country, if needed.

A part of the currency reserves can be directed to [the new system].” (source of the quote: Prime news agency) It seems that the Kremlin chose the all-in-one approach for establishing its anti-dollar alliance. Currency swaps between the BRICS central banks will facilitate trade financing while completely bypassing the dollar. At the same time, the new system will also act as a de facto replacement of the IMF, because it will allow the members of the alliance to direct resources to finance the weaker countries. As an important bonus, derived from this “quasi-IMF” system, the BRICS will use a part (most likely the “dollar part”) of their currency reserves to support it, thus drastically reducing the amount of dollar-based instruments bought by some of the biggest foreign creditors of the US. Of course the key economic player in the BRICS alliance is China.

So will China actually go along with a “de-dollarization” strategy?

Well, the truth is that China has been making moves to become more independent of the dollar for a long time, and it has just been announced that China and South Korea have signed an agreement which will mean more direct trade between the two nations using their own national currencies…

China’s central bank has authorized the Bank of Communications, the country’s fifth largest lender, to undertake yuan clearing business in the South Korean capital, the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) said in a statement.

The announcement came as Chinese President Xi Jinping wrapped up a state visit to South Korea on Friday. China is seeking to make the yuan – also known as the renminbi – used more internationally in keeping with the country’s status as the world’s second biggest economy behind the United States.

Unfortunately, most Americans don’t care about any of this at all.

They don’t understand that more U.S. dollars are actually used outside the United States than are used inside the United States. Because most of the rest of the world uses U.S. dollars to trade with one

another, this has created a tremendous amount of artificial demand for our currency. In other words, the value of the U.S. dollar is much higher than it otherwise would be, and this has enabled us to import trillions of dollars of products at ridiculously low prices. The standard of living that we enjoy today is highly dependent on this arrangement continuing.

And our ability to fund the federal government and our state and local governments is heavily dependent on the rest of the planet loaning our dollars back to us for next to nothing. If we actually had to pay realistic market rates to borrow money, the finances of the federal government would have already collapsed long ago.

So it is absolutely imperative for our own economic well-being that this “de-dollarization” trend not accelerate any further. The rest of the world could actually severely hurt us by deciding to stop using the almighty dollar, and the more that the Obama administration antagonizes both our friends and our foes around the globe the more likely that is to happen.

We live in very perilous times, and the almighty dollar is more vulnerable now than it has been in decades.

If it starts collapsing, it will take down the entire U.S. financial system with it.

Let us hope that we still have a bit more time before that happens, because once the U.S. dollar collapses it will be exceedingly painful for all of us.

What Comes ‘After America’?

by JEROME CORSI | WND | JULY 7, 2014

“After America, there is North America.”

In recent weeks, both General David Petraeus and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., have woven into public speeches the theme of combining the United States, Canada and Mexico into a single, North American Union.

“After America, there is North America,” explained Petraeus, the former U.S. military commander and former head of the CIA, to a panel entitled “After America, What?” held at the Margaret Thatcher

Conference on Liberty on June 18, 2014, hosted by the Center for Policy Studies in Great Britain.

In his presentation to the conference, Petraeus proclaimed the coming of the “North American decade,” a vision he explained was founded on the idea of putting together the economies of the United States, Canada and Mexico, some 20 years after the creation of North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. “In each of these economies there are four revolutions going on,” Petraeus continued, naming the following: an energy revolution, in which the United States is leading the world in the production of natural gas and shale oil, combined with Canada’s enormous resources in the Alberta tar sands and Mexico opening up the state-owned Pemex to international oil companies; an information and technology revolution led by Silicon Valley; a manufacturing revolution; and a life sciences revolution.

“The forces unleashed by these four revolutions with all three countries being as highly integrated as they are, with Canada and Mexico being our two top trading partners, I believe we can argue that after America comes North America,” Petraeus explained.

The syllabus for a similarly themed class Petraeus teaches at the City University of New York entitled “The Coming (North) American Decade(s)” includes the following course description: “This seminar will seek to answer the question, ‘Are we on the threshold of the new (North) American decade(s)?’ To do so, we will: survey the global economic situation; examine the ongoing energy, manufacturing, life sciences, and information technology ‘revolutions’ in the United Sates; assess the implications each revolution has for the U.S. and the global economy; and determine the policies, practices, regulations, and laws needed to enable the U.S. to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the revolutions and thereby to contribute to the global economic recovery from the Great Recession.”

An examination of the assigned reading specified in the course syllabus shows Petraeus has derived much of his thinking from global economic sources in trying to project the future of North America in competition with major regional forces including China, the EU, as well as Russia, India and Brazil.

Pelosi sees U.S. and Mexico as “one nation” Speaking at the U.S. border with Mexico on June 28, Pelosi addressed the crisis of thousands of unaccompanied children and teenagers from Central America illegally crossing into the United States.

Referring to the United States and Mexico, Pelosi said, “This is a community with a border going through it. And this crisis – that some call a ‘crisis’ – we have to view as an opportunity.

“What we just saw was so stunning. If you believe as we do that every child, that every person, has a spark of divinity in them and is therefore worthy of respect, what we saw in those rooms was [a] dazzling, sparkling array of God’s children, worthy of respect. So … we have to use the crisis – that some view as a crisis, and it does have crisis qualities – as an opportunity to show who we are as Americans, that we do respect people for their divinity and worth,” she said.

Champion of North American Union dies In January, WND reported that Robert Pastor, a long-time professor of international relations and director of the Center for North American Studies, died at the age of 66 after a three-year battle with

cancer.

On Oct. 31, 2013, just more than two months before he passed away, Pastor chaired a conference at the Center for American Studies at American University entitled “The NAFTA Promise and the North American Reality: The Gap and How to Narrow It,” a conference Pastor organized to fulfill a request made by Vice President Joe Biden a month earlier.

At the U.S.-Mexico high-level economic dialogue held on Sept. 20, 2013, at the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Mexico City, Mexico, Biden gave a speech in which he commented, “You take a look at the United States, Mexico and Canada, you’d sit there and say, ‘Why? Why isn’t there even more cooperation? It’s just so natural geographically, politically, economically.”

American University posted on its website on Oct. 30, the day before his last international conference started, Pastor’s last remarks prepared for publication, including his vision of NAFTA at a crossroads nearly 20 years after being implemented.

As WND reported, Pastor’s 2001 book, “Toward a North American Community,” presented an argument that North American integration should advance through developing a “North American consciousness” by creating various institutions, including a North American customs union and a North American Development Fund for the economic development of Mexico.

Pastor also was vice chairman of the May 2005 Council on Foreign Relations task force report, “Building a North American Community,” which presents itself as a blueprint for using bureaucratic action though trilateral “working groups” constituted within the executive branches of the United States, Mexico and Canada to advance the North American integration agenda.

Petraeus: NAFTA Has Replaced America VIDEO BELOW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aa_trfcJdME Gen. Petraeus Reveals 'North American Union' Progress VIDEO BELOW http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNpWLWB3-iI

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