#currency-wars #russia #china #usa #petrodollar #trade

Petrodollar : image source - backlash.com

When Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton ("Crooked Hillary") in the 2016 US Presidential Election, the world hoped he would at least attempt to keep his campaign promised and abandon the "perpetual war" foreign policy of his predecessors Barack Hussein Obama and George W Bush (though realists were not betting much money on it actually happening. Six months into his presidency Trump seems to be just as totally in thrall to the Washington War Party and The Deep State as Obmaa, who promised to be the peacemaker and joybringer of the twenty first century, but became the first president to serve two full terms without a single day on which the USA was not at war.

It is only due to the restraint of <a href="http://www.greenteethmm.com/putin-world-war.shtml">Russia</a> and China in the face of contstant <a href="https://originalboggartblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/05/obama-administration-considering-air-strikes-on-assad-regime-even-though-it-could-lead-to-war-with-russia-and-china/">provocation</a> by the USA and NATO that we are not already in (or indeed out of at the wrong end) a global conflict. Had Hillary Clinton won the presidency, one of her campaign pledges, to directly attack Syria and depose the Assad regime (an ally of Russia and China, the ensuing conflict would probably have destroyed most of what is left of European civilisation by now.

But while Washington has been huffing and puffing, <a href="http://edbutt.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/russia-china-sign-10bn-deal-to-ease.html">Russia and China</a> have been waging a more subtle kind of war, with the aim of replacing the US dollar (the petrodollar) as the global reserve currency. And it looks as though they are winning.

The death of the petrodollar could be imminent which would drastically reduce America’s ability to wage war with other people’s money or protect its business sector from competition.We have reported the moves to create a trading system in which cross border trades are settled in the national currency of the vendor, and the establishment of global investment banks by both Russia and China.

Now the formation of a BRICS gold marketplace, which could easily bypass the U.S. Petrodollar in bilateral trade, continues to take shape as Russia’s largest bank, state-owned Sberbank, announced this week that its Swiss subsidiary has started trading in gold on the Shanghai Gold Exchange.Russian and Chinese officials have repeatedly signalled that they plan to <a href="http://www.greenteethmm.com/china-reserve-currency.shtml">create a system</a> with China and Iran using 'paper' gold as a means of nullifying the dollar's influence in bilateral trade between economically and politically powerful nations. We reported in 2015 that a number of influential nations and the EU, the world's largest trading bloc had signed up to the system. This latest movement is quite simply the manifestation of a larger game being played out between the great powers.<b><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/sberbank-gold-china-idUSL8N1K41VS">According to Reuters:</a></b><br />

Sberbank was granted international membership of the Shanghai exchange in September last year and in July completed a pilot transaction with 200 kg of gold kilobars sold to local financial institutions, the bank said.Sberbank plans to expand its presence on the Chinese precious metals market and anticipates total delivery of 5-6 tonnes of gold to China in the remaining months of 2017. Gold bars will be delivered directly to the official importers in China as well as through the exchange, Sberbank said. Russia’s second-largest bank VTB is also a member of the Shanghai Gold Exchange.

A transformation of the entire global monetary system is in progress, driven by the decline of the west where self destructive politically correct thinking and <a href="https://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewpoetry.asp?id=203592">corporate greed</a> dominates foreign and economic policy, and the economic ambitions of Russia, China, Iran, and India, Brazil and other emerging economies.

The implications of these changes should worry U.S. policy makers because the relationship between the USA and the two regional powers in the Middle East, Israel and Saudi Arabia which for nearly the past half century has been underpinned by the monopoly of the petrodollar in world trade, particularly in oil, the worlds most traded commodity. Now the petrodollar is being attacked while saudi Arabia has been destabilised by increasingly extremist Wahhabi Muslim rulers.

The dollar was established as the global reserve currency in 1944 with the Bretton Woods agreement, commonly referred to as the gold standard. The U.S. leveraged itself into this power position by holding the largest reserve of gold in the world. The dollar was pegged at $35 an ounce — and freely exchangeable into gold.By the 1960s, a surplus of U.S. dollars caused by foreign aid, military spending, and foreign investment threatened this system, as the U.S. did not have enough gold to cover the volume of dollars in worldwide circulation at the rate of $35 per ounce; as a result, the dollar was overvalued.

When America finally abandoned the gold standard in 1971, the dollar became a pure fiat currency (decoupled from any physical store of value), until the petrodollar agreement was concluded by President Nixon in 1973. The quid pro quo was that Saudi Arabia would denominate all oil trades in U.S. dollars, and in return, the U.S. would agree to sell Saudi Arabia military hardware and guarantee the defense of the Kingdom, which gave the medieval Kingdom military dominance over all the middle east except for Israel.

At the time US military hardware held an enormous technological advantage over anything Russia and China had. More recently military analyists have warned that while the USA has been obsessing over the 'rights' of gay and transgender soldiers, both rival powers have surpassed them

.A report by the <a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/petrodollar-faces-growing-threat-from-the-east-payments-in-gold-across-asia/5587799">Centre for Research on Globalalization</a> clarifies the implications of these most recent moves by the Russians and the Chinese in an ongoing drive to replace the US petrodollar as the global reserve currency.

Russia & China Declare All Out War on US Petrodollar