"The dollar is our currency, but your problem," then-U.S. Treasury Secretary John Connally told European finance ministers in 1971.
His comment has proved prophetic. The monetary policy of the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden is driving the International Monetary Fund into a volatile corner while current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is seeking to hold China responsible.
Due to U.S.-China tensions, financial flows are increasingly being channeled to countries deemed "geopolitically close" to one side or the other. Decoupling also threatens to strip the IMF of meaning, though the agency is already losing significance.
China has spurned repeated requests from Yellen to visit the country while drifting further away from the U.S. and IMF in terms of policy.
Beijing is clearly seeking to break the dollar's stranglehold and has been trimming its holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds. While the size of its portfolio ticked higher in March, according to the latest data from Yellen's department, this marked only a slight rebound from the 13-year low of $848.8 billion seen with its holdings in February.
The U.S. too wants China's cooperation, but at this point, Beijing's reply is: "The dollar is your currency and your problem."
The way things are moving though, the new line may be: "The yuan is our currency, but your problem."
Anonymous
The future currency would be in digital forms, it would be tagged with somethings solid like precious metals, hard commodities, lands, water resources, etc. The technologies are already here, in matters of time, everything in mother earth and beyond would be included in the mathematical equations. The world orders of the richest countries would be revealed before everybodies and hard to dispute on. Many people thought that Singapore is among the top richest countries in the world, however, with the new calculations Singapore would becomes a poor island again. With the biggest land mass and unlimited supply of natural resources, sparsely populated Russia would be the richest in the world. Canada and Australia would be on the same categories of the world's richest nations.
ReplyDeleteTrue. Wealth measured in toilet papers is not going to matter. It is resources like oil, gas, grains and essential minerals that will rule the world.
ReplyDeleteAnd having a massive land mass is also necessarily important for agriculture, not to mention the resources hidden underground. Those are real potential wealth of a country, not the printing presses printing green toilet papers. By the way those Japanese Banana Notes were also green but not even fit to wipe backsides.
The Africans and Arabs are telling the Chinese, give me $100b worth of roads and high speed railways and ports, cities, you can dig all you want from our land in exchange.
ReplyDeleteThe land, the oil and minerals, are just waste if not dug up and sold to a buyer. Now they can trade them for real stuff, infrastructure, housing, schools, trains etc etc.
In the past, under colonialism, Africa had its resources exploited, using slave labour from Africa, and stolen by the Anglo Saxon Whites, with nothing given back in return by way of development of roads, railways, ports, airports, dams, and water resources - development to cater to the benefit of the African continent. All they saw was the creation of civil wars, wars against one another, debt traps, corruption with bribes to corrupt dictators to gain access to exploit mines and minerals. And the Whites had to gall to call Africa a 'shit hole', adding insult to injury.
ReplyDeleteNow, Africa is waking up. With China, it is resources in exchange for development with no strings attached. Who do you think the Africans will choose? It is a win win situation. Africa gets its infrastructures, China gets to recycle its massive US$ trade surpluses that it accumulated. USA looks on with envy, unable to do anything about it. China does not need to tell African leaders to kick out the Anglo Saxon Whites who were always using that narrative to get rid of China in Africa. China just let the African leaders decide their own fate without prompting them over what to do.