Tag: economics

When Trade War Threatens Real War

Since the 2020 campaign, President Joe Biden has emphasized that America seeks “competition rather than conflict” with China. In the 2023 State of the Union address, amid tensions with the Chinese government over a spy balloon that floated through American airspace, he returned to the notion, saying his administration was willing to “work with China where it can advance American interests” while also bragging the U.S. was in “the strongest position in decades to compete” with the country.

That message of productive, if a bit unfriendly, economic competition is increasingly at odds with the aggressive trade policies Biden is pursuing behind the scenes. Indeed, it’s at odds with what prominent members of the administration, including the secretary of the treasury and the White House’s top national security adviser, are now openly admitting in public speeches: The United States is escalating its trade war with China, and it is doing so by targeting the free movement of goods and money across the globe in new ways.

“Technology export controls can be more than just a preventative tool,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan told a small crowd gathered at the Capital Hilton, just blocks from the White House, in a speech delivered last September. “If implemented in a way that is robust, durable, and comprehensive, they can be a new strategic asset in the U.S. and allied toolkit to impose costs on adversaries, and even over time degrade their battlefield capabilities.”

Sullivan said the theory had already been put to the test once. After Russia rolled tanks and troops into Ukraine in early 2022, the United States responded with financial sanctions aimed at Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies. It also imposed severe export controls meant to hobble Russia’s industrial and military might. In Sullivan’s telling, this represented “the most stringent technology restrictions ever imposed on a major economy.”

“Those measures have inflicted tremendous costs,” Sullivan continued, “forcing Russia to use chips from dishwashers in its military equipment.”

The “adversaries” that could be targeted with that “new strategic asset” would not be limited to those that had invaded their neighbors. For Sullivan, the apparent success of the export restrictions targeting Russia meant we might reshape how America conducts foreign policy, particularly with regard to China. America should abandon the idea that it must only maintain a relative lead over China in the development of key technologies, he said. Instead, the tools and tactics of an international trade war could be used as an economic complement to America’s military arsenal—one that could effectively serve as an opening salvo in a real war.

Sullivan was speaking at a gathering of the Special Competitive Studies Project, a joint venture of tech and national security experts funded by a private foundation created by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Four days before the summit, the group published a lengthy report, co-authored by Schmidt and Robert Work, a deputy defense secretary under both President Barack Obama and President Donald Trump. The report crystallized many bipartisan worries about how China’s technological advances might factor into a future war, and its conclusions mirrored Sullivan’s: “Warfare will be waged with and against industrial and financial power and pit innovation ecosystems against each other.”

What both Sullivan and the report describe could be called a total trade war: a conflict where the exchange of goods and money across borders is viewed through a military lens.

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World War III Has Already Started, and It’s an Economic War

In an article I published in April of 2018, titled World War III Will Be An Economic War, I outlined a number of factors that portend a large-scale conflict between East and West and why this war would be mainly economic in nature. I investigated how this conflict would actually benefit globalists and globalist institutions seeking to bring down multiple nations’ economies while hiding the engineered crisis behind a wall of geopolitical chaos and noise.

The goal? To convince the masses that national sovereignty is a plague that only leads to widespread death and that the “solution” is a one-world system – conveniently managed by the globalists, of course. That is to say, more centralization is always offered as the solution to every problem.

Furthermore, the war itself acts as a cover for the inflationary collapse that our central bank and government has created. We are already seeing fraud propagandists like White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki attempting to mislead the public into believing all our current inflation problems stem from the Ukraine war. This claim requires some impressive mental gymnastics and an epic level of ignorance, but Psaki seems to have no shame about her role as a soulless Goebbels-like figure.

One issue which I used to get a lot of arguments over was the idea that countries like Russia and China would end up so closely aligned. People claimed there were too many disparities and that the countries would ultimately turn on each other in the middle of a financial crisis.

Well, it’s four years later and now we’re going to see if that is true or not. So far, it looks like I was correct.

My position has long been that certain nations have been preparing for a collapse of the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency (the primary currency used in the majority of trade around the world). My belief is that America’s top economic position is actually an incredible weakness; the dollar’s hegemony is not a strength, but an Achilles heel. If the dollar was to lose reserve status, the whole of the U.S. economy and parts of the global economy would implode, leaving behind only those who prepared – those who saw the writing on the wall and planned ahead.

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80% of All US Dollars in Existence Have Been Printed in Just the Last Two Years

Since March of 2020, Americans and the world alike have watched from the sidelines as power hungry politicians have ushered in draconian lockdowns, shutdowns, police state measures, and brought the economy to its knees. While governments around the planet used their central banks to devalue their currencies by printing money to fund their tyranny, the US led the way down this road to fiscal horror.

Thanks to the trillions of dollars the Federal Reserve has printed over the last two years, America is currently in an inflation crisis. One need only look at the price of groceries over the last two years to realize just how bad of a crisis we are currently experiencing.

As the Biden Administration blames high prices on greedy industries, this is little more than a distraction from the actual perpetrator. Nevertheless, the left continues to attribute soaring costs on businesses making “too much profit.”

While these corporations are not innocent in this debacle, the role of America’s central bank is far more insidious. As government spending has skyrocketed over the last two years, they have financed their massive expenditures by stealing value from your savings by printing more money through the central bank.

When you print more money it means there are more dollars chasing the same amount of goods and services, which causes prices to rise. In just the past three fiscal years, federal spending has swollen to nearly $7 trillion a year, up from about $4.4 trillion in fiscal year 2019. Spending was $6.6 trillion in 2020, and $6.8 trillion in 2021.

If we want to put this into perspective, we can take a look at the monetary supply at the beginning of 2020, which showed just $4.0192 trillion in circulation. By January 2021, that number had jumped up to $6.7 trillion — but this was only the beginning.

By November of last year, that number climbed to $20.354 trillion dollars in circulation — meaning that since January 2020, the United States has printed nearly 80% of all US dollars in existence. 

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When It Comes To 2022, You Should Definitely Prepare For The Worst

If you have a bad feeling about 2022, you are not alone.  As we approach the new year, it seems like things are going wrong all around us. We are facing the most epic supply chain crisis in our history, inflation is out of control, vaccine mandates are killing careers and forcing people out of jobs all over the country, and America is the most deeply divided that I have ever seen in my entire lifetime. Meanwhile, another wave of the pandemic appears to be building, our hospitals are already packed with non-COVID patients, global hunger is on the rise, and a major war could erupt in the Middle East at literally any moment. Unfortunately, I am entirely convinced that many of the problems that we are currently dealing with will escalate to an entirely new level in 2022.

For example, if you think that inflation is bad now, just wait until you see what is coming. We just got more evidence that wholesale inflation numbers are absolutely soaring…

New wholesale inflation numbers from September are in and once again prove the rapid increase in prices for everyday items isn’t “transitory” as President Joe Biden has repeatedly claimed.

Wholesale prices rose by 8.6% compared to September 2020, matching the largest increase on record.

The days of relatively low inflation are gone for good. As wholesale inflation numbers continue to spike at a very alarming rate, it is inevitable that these cost increases will be passed along to consumers.

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UK’s Prince Charles Calls For ‘Vast Military-Style Campaign’ By Elites To Achieve Global ‘Fundamental Economic Transition’

The United Kingdom’s Prince Charles called for a “vast military-style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector,” using the “trillions at its disposal, far beyond global GDP,” to “fundamental economic transition” during a climate change conference on Monday.

“My plea today is for countries to come together to create the environment that enables every sector of industry to take the action required,” Charles declared. “We know this will take trillions, not billions, of dollars. We also know that countries, many of whom are burdened by growing levels of debt simply cannot afford to go green.”

“Here we need a vast military-style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector,” he continued. “With trillions at its disposal, far beyond global GDP, and with the greatest respect, beyond even the governments of the world’s leaders, it offers the only real prospect of achieving fundamental economic transition.”

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The US Has Placed Itself In Charge Over Which Nations Get To Eat

The globally influential propaganda multiplier news agencies AP and AFP have both informed their readers that a “fugitive” has been extradited to the United States.

“Fugitive businessman close to Venezuela’s Maduro extradited to US,” reads the AFP headline.

“Alex Saab, a top fugitive close to Venezuela’s socialist government, has been put on a plane to the U.S. to face money laundering charges,” AP announced on Twitter.

You’d be forgiven for wondering what specifically makes this man a “fugitive”, and what that status has to do with his extradition to a foreign government whose laws should have no bearing on his life. The Colombian-born Venezuelan citizen Alex Saab, as it happens, is a “fugitive” from the US government’s self-appointed authority to decide which populations on our planet are permitted to have ready access to food. His crime is working to circumvent the crushing US sanctions which have been starving Venezuelan civilians to death by the tens of thousands.

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Time for Washington To Stop Sanctioning the World: US Arrogance Leaves Trail of Innocent Victims Behind

The “Lift Sanctions, Save Lives” network is lobbying Congress to do what it should have done years ago: assess the impact of economic sanctions now routinely applied to ally as well as adversary. Such a review is long overdue.

Economic sanctions have become a new global battlefield. In July Beijing targeted several organizations and individuals, including former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, in retaliation for earlier U.S. penalties. In January Beijing sanctioned 28 former Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, as the Biden administration took over. In March, after the European Union penalized Beijing for suppressing political liberty in Hong Kong, the Xi regime retaliated against a number of Europeans, including members of the European Parliament.

The Chinese actions had little practical impact – preventing Pompeo and Ross from traveling to Hong Kong is not much of an inconvenience. (Ironically, they deserve to be sanctioned by Americans for their awful performance in office!) Moreover, Beijing’s action, though popular at home, backfired internationally. For instance, the European Parliament effectively killed a pending investment agreement.

Nevertheless, the whining about China’s action is striking. Americans and Europeans declared economic war on the proud, nationalistic People’s Republic of China, and were surprised when it struck back. Who knew that the PRC would dare act like … America!?

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