America Can’t Wait To Boot Russia Off The Dollar
Embrace the end of US Dollar hegemony. MMT fans rejoice.
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In the last few years, we’ve been printing dollars like crazy. I’m not worried about it much. I think that eventually, the inflation we’re seeing now will settle down. Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism had this to say about Japan, another country that has been printing a lot of money, too:
Japan created money supply like a drunken sailor for the better part of two decades and still barely prevented deflation.
America’s debt to GDP ratio is 123%. Japan’s debt to GDP ratio is now 252%. They own $1 trillion of US debt. They’re still buying American companies and real estate. They’re still selling tons of cool stuff to Americans. We still buy their cars. Americans still visit Japan for its food, Buddhist temples, and to take a ride on their bullet trains.
What Yves Smith and almost every central banker knows (I’m not sure all of them know this), is that every nation creates money out of nothing. Every country creates money out of nothing and to give it value, they trade it with other countries for the stuff they want or can’t make. To get dollars, they trade their national currency for dollars and then buy what they want from America. When a nation holds a foreign currency in reserve, they give that currency value.
China owns more than $1 trillion in US debt. The reason they own so much American debt (savings bonds) is to keep the US dollar strong. When the dollar is strong, their products look cheap to us and the trade deficit we have with China grows. When the trade deficit grows, economic demand leaves America and goes to China.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine, and maybe even a little before, I’ve heard rumblings about Saudia Arabia considering the quaint notion of trading their oil for some currency other than the dollar. You know, like a “petro-yuan”, or a “petro-euro”.
The Saudis have been reluctant to go all-in because, well, there is some evidence to suggest that both Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein were assassinated because they dared to question the supremacy of the dollar.
Ellen Brown, president of the Public Banking Institute noted on April 4th, 2022, that no country…
