Tag: economics

China Leads Charge Against USD

The BRICSIA alliance isn’t even bothering to conceal their intentions any longer:

China will be a pioneer leading the world into a new and innovative financial and monetary system, as global calls for an overhaul of the Bretton Woods system – which has been in place for 80 years – gain traction due to the US abuse of the dollar’s hegemony and its irresponsible policy, as well as a fragmenting global economy, Chinese and foreign scholars said.

The new financial system is envisioned to be one based on a diversified set of currencies rather than a single currency, they noted. It will be an open, inclusive system where the voices of emerging market economies would be better represented, and it will enable countries to join hands to promote global economic growth and financial stability.

The comments were made at the 2024 Tsinghua PBCSF Global Finance Forum in Hangzhou city in East China’s Zhejiang Province. The two-day event concluded on Tuesday. This year, the forum was themed “80 Years after Bretton Woods: Building an International Monetary and Financial System For All.”

Taking account of how the US has been weaponizing and abusing its dollar hegemony by imposing unilateral sanctions on other countries, attendees of the forum expressed hopes that a less dollar-centric system could be created from both a theoretical and pragmatic point of view. The Federal Reserve’s policies to deal with US inflation and a recession, which have had negative spillover effects on the world, have raised widespread concerns over an excessive reliance on a single currency.

The challenge being posed to Clown World’s ambitions to rule the world are multi-faceted indeed. And the pillars upon which Clown World rests are rapidly crumbling. I think it’s safe to assume that China will continue dumping its US Treasury holdings.

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Thailand Sides with BRICS

Another nation breaks free of Clown World:

Thailand will apply to become a member of the BRICS economic bloc, the government of the Southeast Asian country announced on Tuesday. The cabinet in Bangkok has approved the text of the official letter expressing Thailand’s intent to join the group, government spokesman Chai Wacharonke said in a statement quoted by local media. According to Chai, the letter declares that Thailand understands the importance of multipolarity and the increasing role of developing countries in international affairs.

We are witnessing the biggest global transformation since WWII. It’s got to be killing Francis Fukuyama, who obviously forgot that history never proceeds in a linear manner for long.

UPDATE: In another blow for Clown World, there will be no more color revolutions in Georgia.

The Georgian parliament has pushed through the divisive ‘foreign agents’ legislation, overriding a veto of the new law by the nation’s president Salome Zourabichvili, local media reported on Tuesday. A total of 84 MPs out of 150 voted for the president’s veto to be repealed and the bill to be passed without any changes, while only four supported the president’s stance, the reports said. Under Georgian law, a presidential veto may be overridden with a simple parliamentary majority, which would require 76 votes.

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The End of an Era

Restaurants closing in 2024:

  • Fuddruckers is expected to close ALL locations by the end of the year
  • Old Country Buffet is closing ALL remainder locations
  • IHOP is closing 100 locations
  • Buffalo Wild Wings is closing ALL Canada locations as well as 60 locations in the US
  • Applebee’s is closing 35 locations
  • Red Lobster is closing 50 locations as they enter bankruptcy
  • Denny’s is closing 20 locations by the end of the year
  • Marie Callender’s is shutting down ALL remainder locations
  • Pizza Hut is planning to close 500 locations
  • Outback Steakhouse is closing 41 of their 700 locations
  • Sai Baro is closing a total of 50 locations with majority being mall locations
  • Mard Pizza is closing a total of 27 locations
  • Ruby Tuesday is closing 16 more locations in 2024.
  • BDQ is closing 8 of their 59 locations.
  • Joe’s Crab Shack is closing 41 of their 60 locations
  • Bonefish Grill is closing 7 locations

This is what cultural and economic decline looks like. Apparently 60 years of relentless immigration are not, in fact, good for the economy or the traditional culture. I wonder, however, how much of these failures are related to economic contraction, reduced consumer spending, and excessive debt versus the lack of appeal held by these traditional restaurant franchises for the newcomers.

UPDATE: A reader writes to explain what he saw at Outback Steakhouse:

Your assessment of the restaurant closures is spot on. I worked at an Outback for 5 years in a nice Chicago Suburb. When I started, Outback was still in its prime but only a year in they began to shift their marketing campaign. Between couponing, offering deals like “all you can eat shrimp”, and bending over for any customer that had the slightest complaint by comping their meal, it slowly but consistently brought the level of the clientele down. This was especially frustrating for myself and the servers alike that were used to 20% tips being the norm (when good service was provided of course) – however with the cheaper and more diverse customers, the tips became less and less. I think what happened is that Outback as a corporation became short-sighted and wanted to attract new customers but in the end it only caused them to be hurt by having to shrink margins to just keep these new customers happy by giving away so many freebees. A few years after I left, to no surprise, the location that I worked at closed.

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It’s worse than you think

Don’t blame the younger generations. They weren’t pumping up the money supply with all their home loans, second mortgages, and third car loans. Which, by the way, is the way to pin down those Boomers who try to blame everyone but themselves for their actions.

Because they are responsible for the post-1980 inflation. They borrowed and spent the money. Inflation isn’t printing money, it’s borrowing money. That’s how the money is created. And the private economy is still, to this day, considerably larger than the public one.

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Unlocking Antarctica

Somehow, I doubt the coming conflict over Antarctica is actually about the oil that was supposedly just discovered there.

Deep beneath the harsh wasteland of the Antarctic shelf lies a prize hundreds of millions of years in the making. For more than 150 years, wars have been fought for access to oil, the thick, black ooze that the world has come to rely on. Despite the growth of renewable energy in recent years, almost all of the world’s energy, 84% as of 2020, runs on fossil fuels, including oil and gas.

And with the Russian discovery of an estimated 511billion barrels of oil and gas in the Antarctic, the race for Black Gold is on once again, as nations across the world claiming they alone own the land above the fossil fuel reserve, even though a historic treaty prevents anyone from accessing it.

But experts have warned that Russia and China should not be trusted and that the West ought to make preparations to prevent them from getting their hands on it. Russia’s discovery underneath the Antarctic is already starting to spook the West, with the issue being brought up at a Select Committee this week.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that there is something important being concealed from the world down in Antarctica, though whether it is aliens, secret Nazi space bases, or the ice wall around the edge of the Flat Earth, I wouldn’t even begin to hazard an opinion. But whatever it is, it’s big enough that the Narrative needed to suddenly announce the existence of a massive oil discovery in order to explain the incipient conflict over it.

World War III is certainly turning out to be considerably more intriguing than I’d ever imagined.

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The Cost of Taking Sides

Russia is far from the only country that has rejected Switzerland’s false assertion of neutrality:

The leaders of Brazil and South Africa will not attend a conference on Ukraine to be hosted by Switzerland next month, reports have said. The summit, scheduled for June 15-16 at the Burgenstock Resort near Lucerne, is expected to revolve around Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s proposed roadmap for ending the conflict with Russia. More than 160 countries have been invited to take part, including members of the G7, G20, BRICS, and the EU. Russia, however, has not been invited to the talks.

China is another major BRICS member which presumably will ignore the Swiss meeting, according to Yury Ushakov, who is assistant to the Russian president for international affairs.

BRICS leaders won’t attend Zelensky’s ‘peace conference’ , RUSSIA TODAY, 17 May 2024

The rejection of Swiss “neutrality” by the BRICSIA nations should have been, but was not, foreseen. And if this isn’t a clear warning to the short-sighted members of the Swiss parliament who have unnecessarily trashed centuries of global confidence and goodwill in a vain attempt to appease the wicked gods of Clown World, at least it should suffice make the gravity of the situation obvious to the Swiss people. It means that voting for the proposed referendum on permanent constitutional neutrality, economic and military, is absolutely necessary no matter what one’s political preferences might be, and no matter what fig leaves and word magic are offered in an attempt to convince the people to let the politicians continue to redefine the concept.

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Brave on Linux

I was unhappy with a cheap Chromebook that I bought to take on the road, so at the advice of a very well-travelled friend, I bought a 7-year-old used, but high-quality laptop for less than one-third the price of the Chromebook, then wiped the hard drive and installed Linux on it, specifically, Mint Cinnamon.

The installation was vastly easier than it was back when I was installing Red Hat 9, and I only ran into two minor issues in the process. Here are my notes on what was a surprisingly fast and easy installation.

  1. There is no need to remove the USB stick on the first reboot after installation. It’s not necessary. And if you do remove it, remove it BEFORE you start the reboot.
  2. Be sure to update the Update Manager before you install Brave using the commands shown below. If you don’t, you will get an error and it won’t install. You can use Copy and Paste for the strings, just remember that Ctrl-V will not work to paste inside the terminal, you have to select Edit/Paste from the pull-down menu.
  3. If you see a ~ at the end of a pasted text string, then you haven’t updated the Update Manager.
  4. Firefox, which comes installed with Cinnamon, has gotten intrusive to the point of unusability. I wouldn’t even consider using it now.

sudo apt install curl

sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg

echo “deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg] https://brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/ stable main”|sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list

sudo apt update

sudo apt install brave-browser

Installing Brave on Linux (Debian-Ubuntu-Mint)

Computer technology has now reached the point of declining marginal utility for most users, and Windows is becoming ridiculously intrusive, so you can get some real bargains as long as you are willing to enter the tank zone and don’t have any esoteric software requirements.

UPDATE: I am reliably informed by the resident Linux community that Ctrl-Shift-V is the correct keyboard command to paste text strings in the Linux terminal.

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Way Too Little, Way Too Late

The Biden Adminstration puts tariffs on Chinese imports:

The US rolled out steep tariffs on Chinese products on Tuesday, quadrupling duties on electric vehicles (EVs) to over 100% and imposing new levies on computer chips, solar cells and lithium-ion batteries. The White House says the new measures are intended to “protect American workers and businesses.”

The tariffs will affect $18 billion of Chinese imported goods, including steel and aluminum, semiconductors, batteries, critical minerals, solar cells and cranes.

Biden administration officials claim the measures have come in response to years of “unfair trade practices” by China, including forced technology transfers, intellectual property violations, and cyberhacking of American businesses.

The time for tariffs is when a country still has industrial capacity, not after it has transitioned to a so-called “service economy”. Service economies don’t win wars, they service the soldiers of the victors.

And it’s not like this is going to help US electric vehicle manufacturers. No one wants to buy their products whether a Chinese alternative is available or not.

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Turkey Cuts Ties with Israel

The Gazacaust continues to have global ramifications:

The Turkish government has suspended all trade with Israel in response to the Gaza war, the Trade Ministry in Ankara said in a statement posted on social media on Thursday.

Türkiye has been one of Israel’s fiercest critics since the conflict with Hamas broke out in October. The suspension of all export and import operations has been introduced in response to the Jewish state’s “aggression against Palestine in violation of international law and human rights,” the statement read.

Ankara will strictly implement the new measures until Israel allows uninterrupted and sufficient flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, the document added.

This is significant, because Turkey is not only a member of NATO, but it has historically been one of the more friendly nations in the Dar al-Islam to Israel. And while we can’t rule out the USA deciding to sanction Turkey, it’s further evidence that US diplomatic efforts are in a serious state of crisis.

Passing anti-speech laws and anti-boycott laws in US states isn’t going to matter much if the greater part of the planet refuses to economically engage with Israel.

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Trump Threatens De-dollarization Sanctions

Threatening the nations that are breaking away from Clown World’s financial control with more of what they seek is highly unlikely to prove successful:

Economic aides to former US President Donald Trump are looking for options to stop countries from shifting away from the US dollar as it faces a growing challenge from emerging markets, including BRICS nations, Bloomberg reported on Friday. The presumptive Republican nominee for the November presidential election and his team are discussing penalties against both allies and adversaries who seek to divert their trade from the greenback to other currencies. The options could include export controls, currency manipulation charges, and tariffs, the outlet said, citing people familiar with the matter.

The global trend toward using national currencies in trade instead of the dollar gained significant momentum after Russia was cut off from the Western financial system and had its foreign reserves frozen in 2022, as part of Ukraine-related sanctions. A bill with provisions authorizing the US to confiscate frozen Russian assets, which Biden signed on Wednesday, could further spur de-dollarization, financial experts have warned. The so-called REPO Act, which was incorporated in the $61 billion military aid package for Kiev, authorized the US president to seize Russian state assets held in American banks.

As quoted by Bloomberg, Trump warned on Thursday that with US President Joe Biden, “you’re going to lose the dollar as the standard. That’ll be like losing the biggest war we’ve ever lost.”

Any such action would so reliably produce the exact opposite of the consequences it purports to seek that it makes one strongly suspect Trump is working with the BRICSIA strategists to bring down Clown World. Imposing export controls, currency manipulation chargers, and tariffs on nations already actively avoiding use of the dollar is only going to exacerbate the speed at which they reduce their economic interactions with the international dollar economy.

Which, given the West’s reliance on Saudi oil, Chinese manufacturing, and Russian natural resources, will tend to also speed up the decline and fall of Clown World.

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