4/6/23: CRASH TEST DOLLAR W/ ALAN JOHNSON

Distraction is the modern-day equivalent of avoiding the dangerous or unknown in ancient times. Uncertainty makes you feel anxious. Anxiety urges you to do something — most often that is to gather information. With communication as it is we think we get all of the information to get us through the day but as we have seen in the past information has been cherry-picked from day to day so that we won’t go into a complete and total revolt.

But it looks like that is wearing thin as well undefined because some people are waking up and are getting annoyed about how bad people get away with criminal activity while good people get thwarted.

It is funny how distractions often keep us looking the other way so that the world sideswipes us with crisis after crisis. The Clown car that is the Trump Indictment and Transgender Bud Light boycotts took precedence over the meeting of world leaders from Russia and China.

One week before his indictment Trump leaked that he would be arrested soon undefined and this of course was the big speculation on the news programs.

Meanwhile, beer drinkers especially those who drink Bud Light are now being vocal about how the Budweiser girls have been replaced with a Budweiser Trans girl; namely, Dylan Mulvaney, whose chronicling of his transition to being a girl is getting on the nerves of feminists and traditional beer drinkers because Mulvaney was featured on a can of Bud Light.

The seriously important news is not so America-centric but it will be soon.

The mainstream media rarely made a peep with regard to the meeting between Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping of China, It was a meeting where both leaders were shaping their plans for the World Order they wish to implement.

Putin stated, “We are in favor of using the Chinese yuan for settlements between Russia and the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

So the world’s second-largest economy and its largest energy exporter are actively trying to dent the dollar’s dominance as the anchor of the international financial system.

Already, 2023 has been a brutal year for US geopolitical hegemony — and it’s not even halfway over.

An unprecedented wave of “de-dollarization” is sweeping the globe. This will affect our power as a nation and a stable economy.

De-dollarization means countries that have used the US dollar for international trade since WWII, are actively adopting alternatives, threatening to end to the US dollar’s global reserve currency status.

For decades, the US has used its currency as a tool for geopolitical domination.

Just a year ago, abandoning the dollar would have been considered national suicide by most policymakers. But a war over a relatively obscure piece of geography has paved the way for a whole new paradigm.

The U.S. dollar was the undisputed king of global currencies, but now dramatic changes are happening. China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia and other nations are making really big moves that will enable them to become much less dependent on the U.S. dollar in the years ahead.

This is really bad news for us because having the primary reserve currency of the world has enabled us to enjoy a massively inflated standard of living.

Once we lose that status, our lifestyles will be much different than they are today. Unfortunately, most Americans don’t understand any of this. Even though our leaders have treated the stability of our currency with utter contempt in recent years, most Americans just assume that the dollar will always reign supreme.

Meanwhile, much of the planet is preparing for a future in which the U.S. dollar will be far less important than it is right now.

The dollar is America’s superpower. It gives Washington unrivaled economic and political muscle. The United States can slap sanctions on countries unilaterally, freezing them out of large parts of the world economy. And when Washington spends freely, it can be certain that its debt, usually in the form of T-bills, will be bought up by the rest of the world.

Sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine combined with Washington’s increasingly confrontational approach to China have created a perfect storm in which both Russia and China are accelerating efforts to diversify away from the dollar.

Their central banks are keeping less of their reserves in dollars, and most trade between them is being settled in the yuan. They are also, as Putin noted, making efforts to get other countries to follow suit.

Washington’s weaponizing of the dollar over the past decade has led many important countries to search for ways to make sure that they do not become the next Russia. The share of dollars in global central bank reserves has dropped from roughly 70 percent 20 years ago to less than 60 percent today, and falling steadily.

The Europeans and the Chinese are trying to build international payment systems outside of the dollar-dominated SWIFT system. Saudi Arabia has flirted with the idea of pricing its oil in yuan. India is settling most of its oil purchases from Russia in nondollar currencies. Digital currencies, which are being explored by most nations, might be another alternative; in fact, China’s central bank has created one.

And we have been reporting that the Central Bank Digital Currency In The United States is certainly being tested and incentives have been given to people to convert their cash into invisible tokens.

All of these alternatives add costs, but the past few years should have taught us that nations are increasingly willing to pay a price for achieving political goals.

We keep searching for a single replacement for the dollar and it is turning into a slow death by a thousand paper cuts.

There is no doubt, we have an international financial crisis in which the dollar has been weakening rather than strengthening.

You can call it an act of war if you like undefined because it hits us where it hurts the most- our ability to have a sustainable income.

The BRICS nations account for over 40 percent of the total global population and close to one-fourth of the global GDP. So the fact that they are working to develop a “new currency” should greatly concern all of us.

Two of the BRICS nations, China and Brazil, have just “reached a deal to trade in their own currencies.”

They are ditching the US dollar as an intermediary.

The deal will enable China and Brazil to conduct their massive trade and financial transactions directly.

During a meeting last week in Indonesia, finance ministers from the ASEAN nations discussed ways “to reduce dependence on the US Dollar, Euro, Yen, and British Pound.undefined

Saudi Arabia just agreed to become a “dialogue partner in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization”

China has just completed its first trade of liquefied natural gas (LNG) settled in yuan, the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange said on Tuesday.

Chinese state oil and gas giant CNOOC and Total Energies completed the first LNG trade on the exchange with settlement in the Chinese currency, the exchange said in a statement carried by Reuters.

The trade involved around 65,000 tons of LNG imported from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange added.

India will offer its currency as an alternative for trade to countries that are facing a shortage of dollars.

Ten years ago, none of these things would have happened.

But now change is happening at a pace that is absolutely breathtaking.

As U.S. relations with both Russia and China continue to go downhill, both of those nations will have a very strong incentive to push de-dollarization even further.

And that is really bad news for the United States because our currency is the source of our economic power and it is the most important thing that we export.

This is a story of monumental importance, but unfortunately, most Americans still believe that our leaders know exactly what they are doing and that they have everything fully under control.

Businesses in the United States are hurting- some of them are institutions that have been with us for decades.

Remember when I talked about Big Mac economics?

I related in a past show that I had an economics teacher who once told me that you can pretty well figure out which way the economy is going by watching the price of movies, Big Macs, and beer.

He said that these items are relatively inexpensive and when you see the prices go up on these rather abundant items you should be ready for high inflation and a struggling economy.

The Big Mac is like a microcosm and it’s price always shifts in the supply and demand for money.

The Wall Street Journal reported McDonaldundefineds Corp is temporarily closing its U.S. offices this week as it prepares to inform corporate employees about layoffs that will be undertaken by the company as part of a broader company restructuring,

McDonaldundefineds said in an internal email last week to U.S. employees and some international staff that they should work from home so it can deliver staffing decisions virtually.

Now you get your pink slip via e-mail.

In January, CEO Chris Kempczinski warned employees that undefineddifficult discussions and decisionsundefined are on the horizon.

Mcdonaldundefineds did not disclose how many employees it is planning to lay off during the companyundefineds restructuring.

Big Mac economics doesn’t seem like a “conspiracy theory” does it?

Still happy about the war and the billions we are throwing at it?

The current conflict between Ukraine and Russia leaves some serious issues on the table, to be addressed.

First of all, the insane levels of support for Ukraine are both a gravy train for the corrupt politicians and weapons manufacturers and an emptying of the US treasury. Basically, everyone’s on the take, in some fashion or other.

But there’s another problem; how to end the war before Russia is sitting at the border of Poland and Romania?

If the US economy collapses, there will be no political will, no stomach for any politician sending so much as a dime to a country that nobody really gives a crap about, anyway.

What does de-dollarization mean for war and peace? If historical precedent is any reliable indicator, the answer is “nothing good.” Consider, for instance, that the United States launched a bloody coup against Libyan President Moammar Gaddafi for the crime of attempting to establish a pan-African currency to replace the dollar.

Remember what happened?

Neoliberal four-star general Hillary Clinton, upon learning of his death, laughed maniacally into the camera.

undefinedWe came, we saw. he died.undefined

The fact that she even had a snowballundefineds chance in hell of being President after that still to this day baffles me.

Donundefinedt get me started on Benghazi undefined that is a whole other topic.

The support for Ukraine will evaporate, and the conflict will quickly- VERY quickly- be over.

This should be the most obvious evidence that the war is meant to level our economy undefined and that the administration is running a criminal operation to destroy America.. while we here in the States whine about Transgender issues, and whether or not a politician is a criminal for paying off a mistress undefined the other countries see this as an opportunity to bend us over a barrel.

We are acting like school bully that doesnundefinedt realize the playground has turned against us until they’re surrounded and without a friend to turn to, it isn’t going to be pretty.

Either China will become the new standard as the lead partner in a Beijing-Moscow axis, or the US will act like a king whose crown is threatened undefined and for us that will be a dangerous thing!

I am sorry if you are offended undefined but we here in America are being forced into playing along with the stupid drama that Washington liberals pull out of their south end to distract us from what is most important undefined and that is how you are going to survive during the implementing of the New World Order.

The banks are gearing up for their CBDC token system and as matters get dire undefined the idea will probably become a novelty until we realize that there is no real security with the token system.

The claimed advantages of cost saving, efficiency, speed, convenience, financial inclusion, improved resilience, financial security and so on, are trotted out time and time again. All of it is part of a dangerous and completely disingenuous sales pitch deceiving you into accepting your own monetary slavery.

Control of this CBDC system will also mean the centralized global power to limit or block payments, target users, redirect funds, enforce purchases, trade assets, add contracts, tax at source and generally exploit any of the other endless range of “functions” CBDC is capable of.

We should not be duped by the faux rationales offered by the proponents of CBDC. We need to diversify and invest in real currencies that retain value undefined even in troubled times.

Since 1971, when central banks finally abandoned any semblance of the gold standard, many have lamented the supposed loss of fiat currency’s “intrinsic value.” The possibility of adding “intrinsic value” to CBDC through smart contracts is apparently enticing some to now welcome CBDC and, thereby, their own enslavement.

The Russian and Iranian governments have already proposed a possible gold-backed CBDC “stablecoin” for interoperable cross-border payments. “Interoperability” suggests it could be “backed” by Sberbank’s tokenized gold DFA.

If this sounds suspiciously like a shell game that’s because it is. Nonetheless, some are convinced and have extolled the alleged virtues of this “gold-backed” CBDC.

It makes no difference if CBDC is backed by gold, oil, nuclear weapons or rainbow-colored unicorn manure. All claims of its advantages are nothing but CBDC deceit.

No matter how it is spun, the brutal fact is that CBDC affords an unimaginable degree of social control to those who program it. From our perspective, unless we have completely taken leave of our senses, nothing warrants taking that risk.

The whole idea is that as individuals we are left demoralized and ‘helpless’. They are waging war, and the populations are their target.