Trade war is an oxymoron. Trade is mutual and voluntary; war is coercion. Trade makes people better off, or they wouldn’t do it. War destroys. Yet, the world is mired in mercantilism that curtails trade for usually illusory geopolitical advantage. Just another in the long list of things governments do to their peoples. From Declan Hayes at strategic-culture.su:
The main threat to the dominance of the Yankee dollar is not Bitcoin or BRICS. It is the risks inherent in Trump’s winner takes all approach to international commerce.
The main threat to the dominance of the Yankee dollar is not Bitcoin or BRICS. It is the risks inherent in Trump’s winner takes all approach to international commerce.
Let’s start with Bitcoin and, in particular, with the recent attempts of Panama and the Central African Republic (CAR) to make it legal tender. Although their respective efforts failed for a number of reasons, chief of those was low internet connectivity, slow adoption by more conservative and marginalised sections of society and its facility in helping the rich transfer their wealth overseas.
With regard to that latter attribute, the old joke is that Mexicans own more of Florida than they do of Mexico, the reason being that Mexico’s rich regularly transfer their wealth northwards to protect themselves against the falling peso or government attempts to confiscate or even tax their wealth. As in Mexico, so also in Panama, the CAR, as well as BRICS countries like Brazil, Egypt and Ethiopia. As regards Russia and Iran, because they both have NATO armies breathing down their necks, capital flight has to be a core concern of their Central Banks.
Just as it is of the World Bank, the IMF and others of the Bretton Woods institutions that took a very dim view of the Bitcoin experiments of the CAR and Panama. Because a world economic order cannot allow itself to be undermined by any of the aforementioned countries, their Bitcoin experiments were doomed, one could easily argue, almost ab ovo.
