Tag: economy

BRICS “Unit” May Bring the World One Step Closer to Global Currency

The BRICS alliance, originally formed in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India, and China, with South Africa added in 2010, has evolved into a significant geopolitical and economic bloc. In a major expansion in 2024, the group welcomed four new members: Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Indonesia joined later, in 2025. This enlargement, referred to as BRICS+, now encompasses countries accounting for approximately 46 percent of the global population — more than 3.6 billion people — and about 35 percent of world GDP, surpassing the G7 in economic weight when adjusted for purchasing power parity. The expansion aims to amplify the group’s influence in global governance, challenge Western-dominated institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and promote multipolarity in international affairs.

Reducing Reliance on the U.S. Dollar

The motivations behind this growth stem from shared frustrations with the U.S.-led financial system, including vulnerability to sanctions and dollar dominance in trade. New members bring diverse strengths: The UAE contributes oil wealth and a financial hub, Iran adds strategic depth in the Middle East, and Egypt, Ethiopia, and Indonesia represent resource-rich areas.

Amid this expansion, BRICS+ has pursued financial innovations to reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar. A key development is the “Unit,” a prototype gold-backed digital settlement instrument unveiled in December 2025. Developed by the International Research Institute for Advanced Systems (IRIAS) in Russia, the Unit is not a full-fledged currency but a blockchain-based unit of account for cross-border trade and investments among BRICS+ nations. It is backed by a fixed reserve basket: 40 percent physical gold and 60 percent made of a weighted mix of BRICS currencies, including the Chinese yuan, Russian ruble, Indian rupee, Brazilian real, and South African rand. This structure echoes historical ideas such as John Maynard Keynes’ “bancor,” and may represent something even more consequential: a gradual shift away from a world in which a single national currency — the U.S. dollar — functions as the primary global reserve asset.

History of a Global Unit of Account

To understand the significance of this moment, it helps to look back to 1944 and the Bretton Woods conference. As economic journalist Ed Conway recounts in his book The Summit, British economist John Maynard Keynes proposed the creation of the aforementioned supranational currency called the “bancor.” Unlike the dollar-centered system that ultimately emerged, Keynes envisioned a global unit of account issued by an international clearing union. This bancor would not belong to any one country; it would be multinational, neutral, and designed to reduce global imbalances by discouraging both persistent deficits and persistent surpluses.

Keynes’ proposal was rejected. Instead, the postwar order placed the U.S. dollar at the center of the international monetary system — a national currency serving as a global reserve asset. Even after the collapse of the gold standard in 1971, the dollar retained its central role in trade settlement, commodity pricing, and sovereign reserves. For decades, that arrangement appeared stable. But the rise of China, the expansion of emerging markets, and the increasing use of financial sanctions have exposed structural tensions in a dollar-centric system. Countries subject to sanctions, or concerned about their vulnerability to dollar-clearing networks such as SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), have sought alternatives.

Recent BRICS discussions about cross-border payment systems, settlement in local currencies, and the creation of new financial instruments reflect a shared desire to reduce dependence on the dollar. Proposals for a digital, commodity-linked unit of account recall aspects of Keynes’ bancor: a reserve mechanism not tied exclusively to one sovereign state.

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Air Freight Rates To Spike As Iran War Escalates

The war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran on Saturday is already disrupting air cargo traffic in the Middle East, a key freight corridor between Asia and Europe where two of the world’s largest cargo airlines are based, and raising the potential for a rise in air freight rates. 

Airlines are suspending flights, rerouting traffic around the conflict zone and unable to use key transload hubs in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar because of retaliatory missile attacks by Iran. More scheduling changes are anticipated in the days ahead. 

Longer routes require more fuel, reducing the amount of cargo aircraft can carry so as not to exceed weight limits. Some airlines are expected to add refueling stops.

“We are expecting some potentially significant move in rates, especially Asia-Europe, if the situation continues with large-scale flight cancellations,” said Neil Wilson, editor of global price reporting agency TAC Index, said in an email exchange.

FedEx has suspended flights to and from Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

“The safety and well-being of our team members is our highest priority. As a result, pickup and delivery services in Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Qatar and United Arab Emirates have been temporarily suspended until further notice. Shipments to and from other markets throughout the region may experience extended transit times,” the company said in a service alert. “We are closely monitoring the situation and will resume services as soon as it is safe to do so.”

UPS has not announced any operational changes, but said in a statement provided to FreightWaves, “We are closely monitoring this fluid situation and using established contingency plans to manage our operations safely and efficiently.”

Qatar Airways, which operates 29 Boeing 777 freighter aircraft and carries huge volumes of cargo on widebody passenger planes, has temporarily halted flights to, and from, Doha due to the closure of Qatar’s airspace. Qatar Airways Cargo offers shippers 13 tons of capacity per day.The airline warned customers to expect flight delays once the airspace re-opens and it resumes operations there. In the meantime, tendered cargo is being held at its hub and other stations around the world. 

Emirates Skycargo, the fourth-largest cargo airline by traffic, has similarly suspended flights through Dubai. It operates nearly a dozen Boeing 777 freighters and leases several crewed Boeing 747-400s from third-party carriers. The United Arab Emirates has closed its airspace and Dubai International Airport sustained minor damage to a passenger concourse from an Iranian attack, according to news accounts from the region.

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California’s green policies destroy blue-collar jobs

Gavin Newsom complains of “faux outrage” over his comments to a largely black audience in Atlanta about his SAT scores, in which he implied a shared lack of ability.

No state makes more of its “enlightened” stance on racial justice than California. But few states do worse.

Governor Newsom and his Sacramento claque have embraced reparations for the descendants of slaves. They are also working overtime to preserve affirmative action policies, despite the electorate’s widespread rejection.

But Newsom’s racial rhetoric is, as the leftist site Jacobin suggests, nothing more than “pure rhetorical posturing.”

For example, the reparations promise new free tuition and housing subsidies to anyone who can prove they are descendants of slaves — but there’s little to no money behind this feint.

California’s adoption of such “reparations,” recently also embraced in San Francisco, also seems a bit absurd, given that it was never a slave state.

California, like every state, is burdened by a racist past, but much of this was aimed at what were larger populations — first Native Americans, then old Californios (descendants of Mexican/Spanish settlers) and, most of all, Asians, who were banned from landownership and were subject to brutal pogroms, the worst occurring in Los Angeles.

But the greatest irony is that both Latinos and African Americans do worse in California than in  “unenlightened places”  like Texas and Florida.

The key difference in California has been the imposition of draconian environmental regulations, which have devastated industries like construction, manufacturing, and logistics. 

It’s what attorney Jennifer Hernandez calls “the green Jim Crow.”  

Latinos have been hardest hit because many are employed in the “carbon economy,” which relies on energy and has been decimated by regulatory pressures. 

For example, Latinos constitute well over 50% of all California construction workers and the majority working in logistics, according to the American Community Survey.  

But due to regulatory constraints, construction in California has been among the weakest in the nation, making it hard to build what the market wants — namely, affordable apartments and modestly-priced single family homes. 

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How Free Markets Should Work

The call for government intervention into market pricing is ancient. This call was resisted politically in the West until the decade before World War I began. After that war ended in 1918, the West saw the triumph of the isms: Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Fabianism, and the smaller isms that arose in the wake of the larger isms.

Calls for government intervention into the price system have multiplied. Hazlitt’s book dealt with lots of these calls. But these calls have played second fiddle in the West to three government-bankrupting ideas: government pensions, government health care for the aged, and military empire. Europe is further along the path to bankruptcy because of the first two programs, along with government health care for the whole population. The United States has specialized in war since 1946.

Because of the price-disrupting effects of central banking and fractional reserve banking—both of which are government-licensed monopolies—the state’s interventions in these closely related sectors of the economy have subsidized the allocation of capital away from what consumers would have chosen, had politically favored special-interest groups not been furnished with fiat money. The economy of the world is now addicted to monetary inflation. Among modern economists, Austrian School economic analysis alone focuses on these disrupting effects. This outlook is not known by the public, and it is rejected by academic economists.

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China calls on banks to limit exposure to US debt – Bloomberg

China has urged its banks to curb their exposure to US government debt, citing market volatility and growing financial and geopolitical risks, Bloomberg has reported citing people familiar with the matter.

Over the past decade, China has steadily trimmed its US Treasury holdings, a shift that has seen it overtaken by Japan and the UK as the largest foreign holders of American debt. Since peaking at around $1.3 trillion in 2013, its holdings have fallen roughly by half to about $650–700 billion, reaching levels not seen since 2008.

Beijing has advised China’s major financial institutions to limit new purchases of US government bonds and reduce positions where exposure is high, according to sources who spoke to the outlet on Monday. The guidance reportedly does not apply to Beijingss’s official state holdings.

According to the report, which cited China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange, Chinese banks held about $298 billion in dollar-denominated bonds as of September. It is unclear how much of that total consisted of US Treasuries.

The guidance, reportedly intended to diversify market risk, came ahead of last week’s phone call between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart, Donald Trump. In October, the two leaders agreed to a one-year trade truce, under which tariffs and export controls on each other’s goods would be lowered.

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Ed Dowd Exposes the $1.5 Trillion Lie Keeping the U.S. Economy Alive

A $1.5 trillion lie is propping up the U.S. economy—and Ed Dowd warns the collapse is already underway.

He says the real reason deportations are being delayed is because kicking illegals out too fast would crash the entire economy.

Dowd called it a scam so massive it rivaled COVID—propped up by Treasury money, shadow banking, and silence.

He also claims the now-defunct DOGE program was dismantled because it exposed just how deep the fraud really goes…

Back in December, he warned we were “At the Beginning of Credit Destruction Cycle.” 

Now that cycle is accelerating. ZeroHedge just reported that BlackRock—the world’s largest asset manager—cut the value of one of its private debt funds by 19% and waived fees.

So Ed was right. He’s right a lot. And now he’s warning we may be just months away from a full-blown economic collapse.

“I’ve never seen risk like this before in my career.”

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The Great Taking: Global Looting of Humanity Imminent?

When the globalist World Economic Forum (WEF) predicted in 2015 that “you will own nothing and be happy” by 2030, people worldwide recoiled in horror at the thought, but almost nobody understood the mechanism by which it might take place. Now, thanks to brave whistleblowers and attorneys, the plan to seize virtually everything is plain to see. The real question at this point is: Can it be stopped before it’s too late? 

If the WEF’s Great Reset is the marketing campaign for global “transformation,” what retired investment banker David Webb calls “The Great Taking” is the legal and financial machinery designed to make the transformation unavoidable. The plan involves ending private-property rights in securities — stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments — to allow mega-banks allied with governments to take everything when the next crisis hits.

In essence, you no longer own your securities; the deed has already been done. The stocks and bonds in your retirement and investment accounts may seem like they are yours. But thanks to little-noticed changes in state law going back decades, they are actually not. And when a major economic and financial cataclysm strikes, the Deep State establishment and the governments and megabanks it controls will take over everything from you.   

Great Reset Reality

If the scheme is not stopped, the World Economic Forum’s prediction that “you will own nothing” could become a reality in the not-too-distant future. Imagine: Ownership and control of every publicly traded company in the hands of a tiny, megalomaniacal elite. And this plan is not just for the United States, but for the world.

Webb, who first blew the whistle on the scheme to steal all securities in recent years with a book and documentary that went viral, explains the operation in terms any non-finance person can understand. For centuries, stocks and bonds were treated as personal property, which insulated the public from failures inside the financial system.

“For hundreds of years … securities were your property,” he explained to this writer during a 2025 interview. “If the banker or the custodian failed … that was entirely their problem.” Historically, the investor could simply tell those holding the securities, “here’s where you send my stuff.” But that “bulletproof” protection is now gone, he warned.

“Security Entitlement”

In fact, even the direct record of ownership has been severed. Securities are now held in pooled form. And what investors possess is not ownership, but a legal abstraction. “You no longer have a property right — you have what’s called a security entitlement,” warned Webb.

Right now, that may not seem too important. After all, you can still call you broker, put in a sell order, and receive your cash. But when the next crisis hits — and many experts and economists believe it could be just around the corner — the significance of this change will be clear.   

This concept was first embedded into American law through amendments adopted across the states beginning in 1994. In short, through seemingly minor changes to commercial and contract law adopted quietly nationwide, Americans were stripped of their property rights to their securities.

The practical consequence is stark: “If the intermediary fails, you have no right to take your property back,” Webb explained.

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Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is Suddenly Concerned About His City’s Sanctuary Based Economy 

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has a new excuse for wanting ICE to leave the city. He claims the presence of ICE is disrupting the city’s economy.

Back in 2020, when BLM activists and Antifa were quite literally burning the city down, do you recall Mayor Frey releasing this type of message?

It’s apparently not a problem for the small business owners of Minneapolis to be completely terrorized by left wing radicals, but ICE agents enforcing federal immigration law is just a bridge too far.

Breitbart News makes another great point about this. Through his sanctuary city policy, Frey has allowed the city’s economy to become sanctuary based. The enforcement of immigration law is actually bad for the city because of this:

Minneapolis Mayor: Law Enforcement Wrecks My Sanctuary City Economy

Frey’s complaint is plausible because Democrats have built the city’s economy on a peculiar institution — the government’s long-term delivery of many foreign workers, consumers, and renters. That historically bizarre foundation is fundamentally different from — and corrosive too — the typical free, level, and uniform marketplace rules that govern American citizens, whether they are employers or employees.

Minneapolis’s resulting “Sanctuary City Economy” enables and worsens many civic problems, including a high share of lower-productivity workers, and the conflicts caused by having residents with illegal, uncertain, or subsidiary legal status.

The city also struggles with two-jurisdiction communities, corrupt business practices, politicized agencies, patronage politics, high taxes, a pay-to-play political machine, scare politics, the loss of high-productivity jobs, large wealth disparities, private regulation, vigilante crime, low-income ethnic enclaves, political instability, and a pro-establishment media.

And of course, Frey has nothing to say about left wing radicals setting up their own checkpoints in the city, This can’t be good for the local economy.

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The US Economy In A Nutshell: A Few Winners, Everyone Else Loses Ground

Here’s the US economy in a nutshell: corporate/state concentrations of financial, market and political power are the winners, and everyone outside these fortresses is losing ground. The Wall Street Journal is generally viewed as pro-business, and so it’s particularly striking when the WSJ published this:

The Economic Divide Between Big and Small Companies Is Growing: Economic fortunes of low- and high-income Americans are diverging–same pattern happening with companies. (WSJ.com)

–The growing divide between the fortunes of small and large businesses mirrors the divide that has emerged over the past year between low-income Americans and their high-income counterparts.

–Large, publicly traded companies in the S&P 500 saw net income increase by 12.9% in the third quarter, contrasting with faltering small-business profits.

–Small businesses are facing economic headwinds, including high inflation and cautious consumers, leading to job cuts; 120,000 jobs were shed in November.

In other words, the small circle of winners and the larger circle of those losing ground describes both households and enterprises: small businesses–lacking the concentrated financial / political power to exercise monopoly-cartel control of their market and protect their fiefdom by buying political influence–are in steep decline–and this is in “good times,” i.e. the economy is expanding, not contracting in a recession.

As in the household sector, the winners are doing splendidly while everyone else loses ground. The media–controlled by the winners, of course–tout the winners as if they’re the norm rather than the outliers in a winner take most economy.

The quasi-monopolies and cartels of Corporate America reign supreme: trillion-dollar valuations, soaring profits, unmatched political and market control. Small business, whose interests are diffuse and widely distributed, are reduced to tax donkeys struggling to pay soaring rent, wages, utilities and overhead costs without the market muscle of monopolies / cartels to force consumers to pay higher prices for degraded goods and services.

The top 10% of households are also doing extremely well, accounting for fully half of all consumer spending as their earnings, passive investment income and assets all bubble higher.

A few of these top earning households are blue-collar households with workers earning top pay due to scarcity of their skillsets, but most are working in the state / corporate sectors with the power to pay high wages and benefits regardless of what’s happening to the bottom 90%.

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IT BEGINS: Zohran Mamdani Announces Plans to ‘Tax the Wealthy’ to Compensate for NYC Budget Deficit 

Well that was fast.

Zohran Mamdani has been mayor of New York City for less than a month and he is already talking about raising taxes on the ‘wealthy’ to make up the city’s budget deficit, which he claims is on par with the Great Recession.

Get ready to see a lot of Uhauls leaving the city.

CNBC reports:

New York Mayor Mamdani says city must hike taxes on wealthy to fill $12 billion deficit

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday said the city’s wealthiest must pay more in taxes to help fill the staggering budget deficit of more than $12 billion that he was left by his predecessor.

“This is at a scale that’s actually greater than what we saw here in New York City during the Great Recession,” Mamdani said of that budget hole during an interview with CNBC “Squawk Box” co-anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin at City Hall.

The Democrat, who took office on Jan. 1 after campaigning on a platform of hiking taxes on the rich, attributed the big deficit to “gross fiscal mismanagement.”

He pointed to actions taken by former Mayor Eric Adams, and by ex-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whom he soundly defeated in the November general election, for causing that budget gap.

Mamdani vowed that his administration will be up front with New Yorkers about budget issues that have been “hidden from them for far too long.”

City Comptroller Mark Levine earlier this month said the new mayor faces a budget shortfall that is projected to total $12.6 billion over the next two fiscal years.

That comprises a $2.2 billion projected deficit on the city’s nearly $116 billion budget for fiscal 2026, which ends on June 30, and a $10.4 billion gap in fiscal 2027.

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