Already, China dominates world trade. Her own economy is already significantly larger than that of the US on the purchasing power parity (PPP) estimates. While being the largest consumer of raw materials, China also exports more finished goods by value than any other country. As the Asian powerhouse, she has lifted the economies of all the countries on the western side of the Pacific Ocean, which including her own between them have a GDP of $50 trillion. Her exports into Asia now exceed her exports to the US. Yet despite this dominance, most of China’s trade is conducted in US dollars, something China is bound to change, if she is to contain external economic risk and replace America as the dominant global empire. Both objectives can only be achieved by China replacing the dollar as a medium of exchange.
The answers to these questions are likely to be revealed in the coming months, possibly in only a matter of weeks, if North Korea heats up. But if China decides to revalue gold, western capital markets will be wholly unprepared for the fall-out. China itself will be affected, as will all other nations that trade with the US or trade with countries that trade with the US. The advanced welfare-driven nations dependent on capital markets are at risk. The great financial crisis of nine years ago will be a light rehearsal compared with what could follow.
The irony is that the countries isolated from the dollar, especially Russia and Iran, will come out best. Iran will be significantly stronger relative to Saudi Arabia, with important consequences for the power-play in the Middle East. Russia will also have an interest in pushing China for this action, partly because it should tip the balance in Syria in Russia’s favor, and partly because the destruction of US hegemony will free Western Europe from being tied to America’s apron strings.
This is the final prize for the two leading nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization: a free trade area which will eventually include the whole Eurasian Continent, with the rest of the world acting as its feedstock. It has always been the ultimate logic behind the Russian-Chinese partnership. Despite all its military power, America will be isolated, unless, like Britain ditching her colonies in the 1960s, America accepts she no longer controls global commerce.
That is hard to imagine.....
Perhaps China and Russia no longer have the luxury of time. America’s increased military belligerence in Trump’s first hundred days might force their hand. Perhaps America, knowing her demise is becoming increasingly inevitable, has some dramatic plan under wraps to seize the financial initiative, as dramatic perhaps as the Nixon shock, when America abandoned the post-war gold standard. The instability brought into the geopolitical equation by the Trump presidency, and the early signs the US economy is grinding to a halt under the sheer weight of consumer and government debt, are increasingly likely to prompt China and Russia into firm financial action, if only to protect themselves in an unstable financial and monetary environment.
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