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Write an article about: Countries worldwide are dropping the US dollar: De-dollarization in China, Russia, Brazil, ASEAN. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

ASEAN, Brazil, China, de-dollarization, Dilma Rousseff, dollar, gas, IMF, India, Indonesia, Kenya, LNG, Lula da Silva, Malaysia, NDB, New Development Bank, oil, petrodollar, renminbi, Russia, Saudi Arabia, UAE, World Bank, yuan

The global de-dollarization campaign is gaining momentum, as countries around the world seek alternatives to the hegemony of the US dollar. China, Russia, Brazil, India, ASEAN nations, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE are now using local currencies in trade. (Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.) The global de-dollarization campaign is gaining momentum, as countries around the world seek alternatives to the hegemony of the US dollar. China and Russia are trading in their own currencies. Beijing and Brazil have also dropped the dollar in bilateral trade. The UAE is selling China its gas in yuan, through a French company. Southeast Asian nations in ASEAN are de-dollarizing their trade, promoting local payment systems. Kenya is buying Persian Gulf oil with its own currency. Even the Financial Times newspaper has acknowledged that a “multipolar currency world” is emerging. When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Moscow in March, his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin revealed that two-thirds of the countries’ bilateral trade is already conducted in the ruble and renminbi. “It is important that our national currencies are increasingly used in bilateral trade“, Putin said. “We should continue promoting settlements in national currencies, and expand the reciprocal presence of financial and banking structures in our countries’ markets”. The Russian leader added, “We support using Chinese yuan in transactions between the Russian Federation and its partners in Asia, Africa and Latin America”. China’s President Xi Jinping traveled to Russia, where he pledged “changes we haven’t seen for 100 years”. Both agreed to deepen economic integration and challenge the hegemony of the US dollar, using yuan and other currencies in international tradehttps://t.co/uTPkDIrfVb — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 26, 2023 Just a week after Xi’s trip to Moscow, China announced that it had for the first time used yuan to buy liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the UAE. The deal was negotiated between the state-owned China National Offshore Oil Company and the French company TotalEnergies, meaning European firms are now willing to conduct transactions in yuan. French media outlet RFI described the trade as a “major step in Beijing’s attempts to undermine the US dollar as universal ‘petrodollar’ for gas and oil trade”. The report quoted the chairman of the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange, Guo Xu, who said the deal encouraged “multi-currency pricing, settlement and cross-border payment”. China's first yuan-settled liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade was completed on Tuesday through the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange, with about 65,000 tonnes of LNG imported from the UAE changing hands in the trade. (file pic) pic.twitter.com/7J9KYipvmB — People's Daily, China (@PDChina) March 29, 2023 On March 30, China and Brazil (the world’s most populous and sixth-most populous countries) announced they had come to an agreement to trade with each other in their local currencies, yuan and reais. China’s media network CGTN reported, “The deal will enable China, the world’s second-largest economy, and Brazil, the biggest economy in Latin America, to conduct their massive trade and financial transactions directly, exchanging yuan for reais and vice versa instead of going through the dollar”. It noted that China is Brazil’s biggest trading partner, and in 2022 the two countries did more than $150.5 billion worth of trade. Brazil’s leftist President Lula da Silva has called for Latin America to develop a new currency for regional trade, which he calls the Sur. It's happening: Brazil and Argentina are making plans for a Latin American currency, to “boost regional trade and reduce reliance on the US dollar”, the Financial Times reported Lula (a co-founder of the BRICS) had pledged this while running for presidenthttps://t.co/IAiwfeLz2z — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 22, 2023 Just two days before China and Brazil revealed their deal to trade in local currencies, the South American giant’s former President Dilma Rousseff officially assumed her new role as chief of the New Development Bank (NDB) in Shanghai. The NDB, commonly known as the BRICS Bank, was created by the bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa as an alternative to the US-dominated World Bank. Dilma, like her ally Lula, is a leftist from Brazil’s Workers’ Party. In a speech that Geopolitical Economy reported on in 2022, Dilma analyzed the US-China conflict as “a rivalry of two systems”, a struggle between neoliberalism and socialism. She condemned US sanctions and “dollar hegemony” and called for Latin America “to break with the Monroe Doctrine”. H.E. Mrs. Dilma Rousseff, the NDB newly elected President, has started her first day in office in the NDB Headquarters in Shanghai, China. pic.twitter.com/JOLblXhhzQ — New Development Bank (@NDB_int) March 28, 2023 Countries in Southeast Asia are also de-dollarizing. The finance ministers and governors of the central banks of the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) met in Indonesia on March 28. According to the news website ASEAN Briefing, at the top of their agenda were “discussions to reduce dependence on the US Dollar, Euro, Yen, and British Pound from financial transactions and move to settlements in local currencies”. ASEAN is developing a cross-border digital payment system that would allow the use of local currencies in regional trade. ASEAN Briefing noted that Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and Thailand agreed on this in November 2022. The media outlet added that Indonesia’s central bank plans on creating a local payment system as well. ASEAN Briefing wrote: Indonesian President Joko Widodo has urged regional administrations to start using credit cards issued by local banks and gradually stop using foreign payment systems. He argued that Indonesia needed to shield itself from geopolitical disruptions, citing the sanctions targeting Russia’s financial sector from the US, EU, and their allies over the conflict in Ukraine. Indonesia is the fourth-most populous country on Earth, after the United States. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is meeting in Indonesia "Top of the agenda are discussions to reduce dependence on the US Dollar, Euro, Yen, and British Pound from financial transactions and move to settlements in local currencies" https://t.co/BPMGhpgtLv — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) March 31, 2023 Another Southeast Asian nation, Malaysia, is publicly advocating de-dollarization. Malaysia’s Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim met with Chinese President Xi in Beijing on March 31, where the two leaders discussed plans to weaken US dollar hegemony and even create an “Asian Monetary Fund”. This is a frontal challenge to the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF), which emerged from the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference that established the dollar as the global reserve currency. Anwar proposed the Asian Monetary Fund at the Boao Forum in China’s Hainan province. “There is no reason for Malaysia to continue depending on the dollar”, Anwar said, in comments reported by Bloomberg. The media outlet added that Malaysia’s central bank is developing a payment mechanism so the Southeast Asian country can trade with China using its own currency, the ringgit. China is open to talks with Malaysia on forming an Asian Monetary Fund, said Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, amid the world’s growing impatience with the King Dollar’s dominance https://t.co/oXnuqomt9n — Bloomberg (@business) April 4, 2023 Bloomberg noted: The Malaysian leader’s comments come just months after former officials in Singapore discussed what economies in the region should be doing to mitigate the risks of a still-strong dollar that’s weakened local currencies and become a tool of economic statecraft. The dollar’s strength is a headache for Asian nations including Malaysia, which is a net importer of food items. “Economic statecraft” is a roundabout way of saying economic warfare. The unilateral sanctions the United States has imposed on countries all across the planet, in flagrant violation of international law, are backfiring. Many nations are now seeking financial alternatives, afraid that they could be the next target. And with the US Federal Reserve constantly raising interest rates, the dollar has become so strong that it is hurting the currencies of other countries, making imports more expensive. Even US ally India is hedging its bets on de-dollarization. Reuters reported that Russia’s largest oil producer, the state-owned company Rosneft, made an deal with India’s top refiner Indian Oil Corp, which is also state owned, to use the Dubai price benchmark in oil sales, as opposed to the Brent benchmark. The decision “to abandon the Europe-dominated Brent benchmark is part of a shift of Russia’s oil sales towards Asia”, it wrote. Reuters cited “Rosneft’s chief executive Igor Sechin, [who] said in February that the price of Russian oil would be determined outside of Europe as Asia has emerged as largest buyer of Russian oil”. Russia and India agreed to use the Asia-focused Dubai oil price benchmark in their bilateral trade. "The decision by the two state-controlled companies to abandon the Europe-dominated Brent benchmark is part of a shift of Russia's oil sales towards Asia"https://t.co/dpYheR1mHQ — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 4, 2023 Several countries on the African continent are advocating de-dollarization as well. In March, Kenya signed an agreement with state-owned companies in Saudi Arabia and the UAE to buy oil on credit, using the country’s local currency, the shilling. Kenya asked to do so because the African nation’s dollar reserves are running low, as it pays for more expensive imports. Kenya to start buying petroleum products with Kenyan shillings https://t.co/Q6HEcB4I6r — Peoples Gazette (@GazetteNGR) March 27, 2023 One of the world’s leading newspapers, the Financial Times, acknowledged in an article in March that these historic developments are part of a transition to a “multipolar currency world“. The chair of the Financial Times’ editorial board and US editor-at-large, Gillian Tett, wrote that “US banking turmoil, inflation and looming debt ceiling battle is making dollar-based assets less attractive”. She noted that the former Goldman Sachs economist who first popularized the term BRICS, Jim O’Neill, has stated that “the dollar plays far too dominant a role in global finance”. Prepare for a multipolar currency world https://t.co/gCoN2YjEEY — FT World News (@ftworldnews) March 30, 2023

Write an article about: Europe angry that US profits from Ukraine proxy war while destroying EU economy. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

EU, Europe, European Union, gas, Joe Biden, LNG, Ukraine

EU leaders are furious that the US is making lots of money from the proxy war in Ukraine by selling weapons and exporting expensive natural gas. Meanwhile European industries are being destroyed as high energy prices and US subsidies push its companies to go overseas. (Se puede leer esta nota en español aquí.) Cracks are emerging in the NATO alliance. Numerous Western corporate media outlets have published reports showing growing political divisions between the United States and European Union. EU leaders are angry that the US is making lots of money from the proxy war in Ukraine, both by selling vast quantities of weapons and by making Europe reliant on its expensive liquified natural gas (LNG), instead of Russia’s significantly cheaper pipeline gas. Meanwhile, European economies suffer from high inflation rates and an energy crisis that make manufacturing so expensive and uncompetitive it could bankrupt entire industries. Politico published an article in November detailing precisely this, titled “Europe accuses US of profiting from war.” An unnamed “senior official” in Europe told the publication, “The fact is, if you look at it soberly, the country that is most profiting from this war is the U.S. because they are selling more gas and at higher prices, and because they are selling more weapons.” Politico wrote: French President Emmanuel Macron said high U.S. gas prices were not “friendly” and Germany’s economy minister has called on Washington to show more “solidarity” and help reduce energy costs. Ministers and diplomats based elsewhere in the bloc voiced frustration at the way Biden’s government simply ignores the impact of its domestic economic policies on European allies. When EU leaders tackled Biden over high U.S. gas prices at the G20 meeting in Bali last week, the American president simply seemed unaware of the issue. The escalating US-EU conflict recalls the notorious maxim of former Secretary of State and imperial planner Henry Kissinger: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” The Biden administration’s passage of the Inflation Reduction Act this August has sent the EU “into full-blown panic mode,” and even threatens to bring about a “transatlantic trade war,” according to Politico. The law pledges up to $369 billion in subsidies to support companies that claim to be environmentally friendly, as part of a “green” transition. These huge US subsidies “threaten to destroy European industries,” the outlet reported, and have led Brussels to “draw up plans for an emergency war chest of subsidies to save European industries from collapse.” An unnamed EU diplomat told Politico, “The Inflation Reduction Act has changed everything,” asking, “Is Washington still our ally or not?” A similar article by a staunchly pro-NATO columnist, also published by Politico, insisted “Biden keeps ignoring Europe. It’s time EU leaders got the message.” The column emphasized that the US government’s top priority its its new cold war on China. “The U.S. remains steadfastly focused on what most perceive to be its main existential challenge: China,” Politico wrote. “In that equation, Europe is often an afterthought.” The media outlet concluded: But what the Europeans are discovering is that the Ukraine war is just one facet of the U.S.’s larger strategic duel with China, which will always take precedence over EU interests. That was true under Trump, and it remains true under his successor. It’s just that the message is delivered in a different style. In the long run, Biden’s polite indifference may prove more deadly. As recently as the beginning of 2022, Russia was the largest exporter of both gas and oil to Europe. But in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, the US and EU imposed harsh sanctions on Moscow and vowed to boycott its energy. This has blown back on Europe, and hard. In August, Bloomberg published an article titled “European Power Prices Reach Records as Industry Starts to Buckle.” It noted that electricity prices in Germany have risen as much as 500% in the past year. The report warned the “magnitude of the crisis isn’t comparable to anything in the past few decades.” “Countries across Europe are planning for possible power shortages this winter, with some considering rationing supplies to certain industries to ensure essential demand can be met,” Bloomberg said. These historically high energy prices were already painful enough. But Washington’s proposed subsidies have only further incentivized European companies to move to the United States. In a November report titled “European industry pivots to US as Biden subsidy sends ‘dangerous signal,’” the Financial Times reported the same: the Inflation Reduction Act “is moving momentum a lot from Europe to the US.” The FT wrote: The combination of the Biden Administration’s $369bn package and high energy costs in Europe, where even after recent declines gas prices remain five times more expensive than in North America, is sounding alarm bells in EU capitals. “I think we need a European wake-up on this point,” French president Emmanuel Macron told executives from domestic industrial companies such as glassmaker Saint-Gobain and cement maker Lafarge in a speech last week. Germany’s economy minister, Robert Habeck, described the US support as “excessive” and “hoovering up investments from Europe”. The EU has accused Washington of breaching World Trade Organization rules and set up a task force with the Biden administration to resolve their differences. The Wall Street Journal published a similar article in September, titled “High Natural-Gas Prices Push European Manufacturers to Shift to the U.S.” “The Ukraine war is driving up energy costs in Europe, while relatively stable prices and green-energy incentives are luring companies to the U.S.”, the newspaper wrote. “Battered by skyrocketing gas prices, companies in Europe that make steel, fertilizer and other feedstocks of economic activity are shifting operations to the U.S., attracted by more stable energy prices and muscular government support,” the Wall Street Journal added. The report predicted that Europe “could face high prices, at least for gas, well into 2024, threatening to make the scarring on Europe’s manufacturing sector permanent.”

Write an article about: What is ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’? Inside China’s economic model. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

China, John Ross, neoliberalism, podcast, socialism

How does socialism with Chinese characteristics differ from Western neoliberal capitalism? Economist John Ross, who has taught in China, explains Beijing’s model. Multipolarista editor Benjamin Norton discussed China’s socialist model with economist John Ross, a senior fellow at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. Ross criticized Western left-wing academics like David Harvey, who have argued that China’s economy is capitalist or even neoliberal. “The Chinese model has nothing to do whatever with neoliberalism. And that’s why it produced totally different results,” Ross said. “China has raised, by World Bank criteria, since 1978, 850 million people out of poverty,” he emphasized. “This is the greatest contribution to human rights in the entire world.” “There has never been such an alleviation of poverty in the whole of world history,” he noted. “It’s more than 70% of all those people taken out of poverty on the world scale.” Ross continued: “You can see it most clearly by looking at the state sector within the Chinese economy. The state sector within the Chinese economy accounts for around 40% of the investment in China. And that is concentrated in all the large companies. The largest companies in China are state-owned companies, by far.” “This means that the economy can be controlled by lifting the level of investment by the state up and down. And that’s the way the economy is run.” “Where does the word socialism come from? It comes from ‘socialized,’” he explained. “Of course the economy develops in a very uneven way. You have very, very large, that is highly socialized companies, which are the most powerful, the most developed, and we may say the commanding heights of the economy. And then you go down to single-family farms, single-family shops, etc., which are not highly socialized.” “China does differ from the Soviet Union,” Ross pointed out. “The Soviet Union had what I would call an administered economy. Every single detail down to the prices were controlled.” “China doesn’t do that. The way China runs its economy is that it moves the level of state investment up and down.” In the Soviet Union all industries were owned and run by the state, “whereas China took what you would call the commanding heights, or if you want to use Marx’s term, the most socialized sections of the economy are taken into the state.” “This means in particular, China, the Chinese state, owns the largest companies. It particularly dominates the banks. All the large banks in China are state-owned. The land is state-owned. The energy system is state-owned. The largest manufacturing companies are state-owned.” “But it doesn’t want to take over, and shouldn’t take over incidentally, every little local corner shop, every single restaurant, etc. There, that can be done perfectly well by individual people; in fact it will develop more efficiently.” Ross, who previously served as director of economic policy for London Mayor Ken Livingstone, also discussed the sabotage of leftist Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and the party’s turn to the right. “If you look at the situation, what was done by the Labour Party to Corbyn, it was a flat out vilification and falsification of him, ridiculous charges such as that he was an anti-semite. Jeremy Corbyn is the most determined anti-racist,” Ross said. “The idea that the Labour Party was institutionally anti-semitic, or that Corbyn was anti-semitic, was absolute nonsense, an absolute frame up.” “And now what has happened is we now have a very right-wing, I’m afraid, leadership of the Labour Party, because this attack on Corbyn was not successfully defeated, which has very terrible consequences.”

Write an article about: BRICS Bank de-dollarizing, promises 30% of loans in local currencies, new chief Dilma Rousseff says. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Brazil, BRICS, de-dollarization, Dilma Rousseff, dollar, inflation, interest, Lula da Silva, NDB, New Development Bank

The new chief of the BRICS bloc’s New Development Bank, Brazil’s leftist ex-President Dilma Rousseff, revealed they are gradually moving away from the US dollar, promising at least 30% of loans in local currencies of members. The new president of the BRICS Bank has revealed that the Global South-led bloc is advancing toward de-dollarization, gradually moving away from use of the US dollar. The New Development Bank plans to give nearly one-third (30%) of its loans in the local currencies of the financial institution’s members. Dilma Rousseff, the left-wing former president of Brazil, took over the leadership of the Shanghai, China-based New Development Bank (NDB) this March. The new chief of the BRICS' New Development Bank, Brazil’s leftist ex-President Dilma Rousseff, revealed they are gradually moving away from the US dollar, promising at least 30% of loans in local currencies of members. More here: https://t.co/CyJKBODc2D pic.twitter.com/PUGokEHYxw — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 15, 2023 The NDB was created in 2014, by the BRICS bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, as a Global South-oriented alternative to the US-dominated World Bank, which is infamous for imposing neoliberal economic reforms on impoverished countries, which hinder their development. In an interview with China’s major media outlet CGTN on April 14, Rousseff explained, “It is necessary to find ways to avoid foreign exchange risk and other issues, such as being dependent on a single currency, such as the US dollar”. “The good news is that we are seeing many countries choosing to trade using their own currencies. China and Brazil, for instance, are agreeing to exchange with RMB (renminbi) and the Brazilian real”, she said. “At the NDB, we have committed to it in our strategy. For the period from 2022 to 2026, the NDB has to lend 30% in local currencies, so 30% of our loan book will be financed in the currencies of our member countries”, Rousseff added. “That will be extremely important to help our countries avoid exchange rate risks and shortages in finance that hinder long-term investments”, the new NDB president stressed. H.E. Mrs. Dilma Rousseff, the NDB newly elected President, has started her first day in office in the NDB Headquarters in Shanghai, China. pic.twitter.com/JOLblXhhzQ — New Development Bank (@NDB_int) March 28, 2023 Members of the NDB not only include the founders of the BRICS but also Bangladesh, the UAE, and Egypt. Uruguay is likewise in the process of joining, and many other countries have expressed interest. Argentina, Iran, and Algeria have formally applied to join the extended BRICS+ bloc, and according to the foreign minister of Russia, Sergei Lavrov, other nations that are interested “include Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Argentina, Mexico, and a number of African nations”. Flags of the members of the BRICS bloc’s New Development Bank (NDB) South Africa’s foreign minister, Naledi Pandor, revealed in January that BRICS plans to “develop a fairer system of monetary exchange” in order to weaken the “dominance of the dollar”. “The systems currently in place tend to privilege very wealthy countries and tend to be really a challenge for countries, such as ourselves, which have to make payments in dollars, which costs much more in terms of our various currencies”, she said. “So I do think a fairer system has to be developed, and it’s something we’re discussing with the BRICS ministers in the economic sector discussions”, Pandor added. BRICS is making “a fairer system of monetary exchange” to challenge the “dominance of the dollar”, South Africa revealed. Saudi Arabia, which applied to join BRICS, is considering selling oil in other currencies. China says it will by Gulf energy in yuanhttps://t.co/fDWhqExVAw — Geopolitical Economy Report (@GeopoliticaEcon) March 13, 2023 This April, Brazil’s current president, Lula da Silva, a fellow member of Dilma’s leftist Workers’ Party, took a historic trip to China, where he called to challenge US dollar dominance. While in Shanghai, Lula was the first head of state to visit the NDB headquarters, where he attended the swearing in ceremony for Dilma. Lula said the NDB’s goal is “creating a world with less poverty, less inequality, and more sustainability”. He added that the bank should play a “leading role in achieving a better world, without poverty or hunger”. This was the first time that a Head of State visited the Bank's Headquarters in Shanghai and addressed the NDB staff in person. President Lula had the opportunity to witness the NDB's commitment to promoting sustainable development and delivering on its mandate.#NDB #BRICS pic.twitter.com/MlC9tfySPY — New Development Bank (@NDB_int) April 13, 2023 Dilma also commented, “As a former president of Brazil, I know the importance of the work of multilateral banks to support developing countries, particularly NDB, in addressing their economic, social, and environmental needs”. “Becoming the president of the NDB is undoubtedly a great opportunity to do more for the BRICS, the emerging markets, and developing countries”, she said. In her speech, H.E. Mrs. Dilma Rousseff emphasized the Bank's commitment to supporting Brazil's sustainable development goals and highlighted the importance of the presidential visit for strengthening the cooperation between the NDB and Brazil.#NDB #BRICS pic.twitter.com/0aut3dLM1H — New Development Bank (@NDB_int) April 13, 2023 In her interview with CGTN, Rousseff explained her goals with the BRICS Bank: It is very important to me that New Development Bank, the bank of the BRICS, acts as the tool to support the development priorities of the BRICS and other developing countries. We need to invest in projects that contribute to three fundamental areas: First, we need to support the countries with regards to climate change and sustainable development goals. Second, we should promote social inclusion at every opportunity we have. And I believe we should finance their most critical and strategic infrastructure projects. That said, we want to promote quality development. Developing countries still don’t have the necessary infrastructure. They don’t have enough ports, airports, and highways to meet their needs. And many times, the ones they have are not adequate. They still have to build alternatives and more modern models of transportation, for instance. I see China, a country that has developed capability for alternative transportation at the scale and quality it needs. NDB has to support the other countries to also build their quality infrastructure as well, like high-speed trains. It is very important to invest in technology and innovation, invest in universities for example. Our countries will not overcome extreme poverty if we don’t invest in education, science, and technology. When asked what challenges the BRICS and NDB face, Rousseff replied: The world now is under the threat of high inflation and restrictive monetary policy, particularly in developed countries. Such monetary policy means a higher interest rate, and therefore a higher probability of reduction in growth and a higher probability of recession. This presents an important question for the BRICS. We need a mechanism, a so-called anti-crisis mechanism, which must be counter-cyclical and support stabilization. It is necessary to find ways to avoid foreign exchange risk and other issues, such as being dependent on a single currency, such as the US dollar. The good news is that we are seeing many countries choosing to trade using their own currencies. China and Brazil, for instance, are agreeing to exchange with RMB (renminbi) and the Brazilian real. At the NDB, we have committed to it in our strategy. For the period from 2022 to 2026, the NDB has to lend 30% in local currencies, so 30% of our loan book will be financed in the currencies of our member countries. That will be extremely important to help our countries avoid exchange rate risks and shortages in finance that hinder long-term investments.

Write an article about: Economist Michael Hudson explains inflation crisis and Fed’s secretive $4.5 trillion bank bailout. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

banks, China, dollar, economics, Fed, Federal Reserve, gold, Michael Hudson, Russia, Wall Street

Economist Michael Hudson discusses the global inflation crisis and how the US Federal Reserve quietly (and apparently illegally) bailed out big banks in 2019 with $4.5 trillion of emergency repo loans Ben Norton interviewed economist Michael Hudson to discuss what is causing the global inflation crisis, and also how the US Federal Reserve quietly bailed out big banks in September 2019 with $4.5 trillion of emergency repo loans that appear to have blatantly violated the law. TRANSCRIPT BENJAMIN NORTON: Hey, everyone. This is Ben Norton, and I’m joined by a friend of the show, one of our favorite guests, Michael Hudson, the economist. His reputation precedes him; many of you probably know him. You can go to michael-hudson.com and check out his excellent articles and his books. We had him on a few months ago to talk about the new, third edition of his book “Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.” And today we’re going to talk about the inflation crisis around the world. In the US in 2021, there was inflation around 7%, and this has led to a lot of discussion about what is causing the inflation, why there’s inflation. Professor Hudson has pointed out for many years that inflation in the US and other countries is often measured in a very strange way that doesn’t include housing prices, and it doesn’t include what he calls the FIRE sector: finance, insurance and real estate. So today we’ll talk about the rising rates of inflation and what corporate media outlets are missing about the story. But before we begin talking about that, Professor Hudson, another reason I wanted to have you today is to talk about a big story that went viral. It was just published, and it’s on the website Wall Street on Parade. It went so viral that the website actually went down, because it was being shared so much. This is an article just published at wallstreetonparade.com. I have it up in the archive because the website is down. And the article is titled, “There’s a News Blackout on the Fed’s Naming of the Banks that Got Its Emergency Repo Loans; Some Journalists Appear to Be Under Gag Orders.” And this is by Pam Martens and Russ Martens, published on January 3. I’ll just briefly summarize the main point, and then I want to get your response, because I think this is obviously part of the discussion around the inflation crisis. “The Federal Reserve released the names of the banks that had received $4.5 trillion” – that is trillion with a T – “in cumulative loans in the last quarter of 2019 under its emergency repo loan operations for a liquidity crisis that has yet to be credibly explained.” So Professor Hudson, I’ll ask you in a second to explain what that liquidity crisis was. And they point out that, among the borrowers that received $4.5 trillion in loans from the Fed were JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup, “three of the Wall Street banks that were at the center of the subprime and derivatives crisis in 2008 that brought down the U.S. economy.” “That’s blockbuster news. But as of 7 a.m. this morning (January 3), not one major business media outlet has reported the details of the Fed’s big reveal.” And they suspect there are some journalists under gag orders. And then the other point to add here is that this borrowing was happening in September 2019, and it was actually before the first case of Covid was identified in the United States. They point out that the first Covid case was reported in the U.S. in January, and then the World Health Organization declared a pandemic in March 2020. This massive borrowing spree of $4.5 trillion was happening in September. So there are a few things you can respond to Professor Hudson. Maybe we can start with, why was the Fed giving trillions of dollars to these large Wall Street banks. And why was there a liquidity crisis? That’s unexplained. Why did the Fed refused to release the names of these banks? And was there a financial crisis before Covid that the U.S. government later was able to blame on Covid, but it was actually a financial crisis in the making? MICHAEL HUDSON: There was actually no liquidity crisis whatsoever. And Pam Martens is very clear about that. She points out the reason that the regular newspapers don’t report it is the loans violated every element of the Dodd-Frank laws that were supposed to prevent the Fed from making loans to particular banks that were not part of a liquidity crisis. In her article, she makes very clear by pointing out these three banks, Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs – which used to be a brokerage firm – and Citibank, that the Federal Reserve laws and the Dodd-Frank Act explicitly prevent the Fed from making loans to particular banks. It can only make loans if there’s a general liquidity crisis. And we know that there wasn’t at that time, because she lists the banks that borrowed money, and there were very few of them. There were the big three that she mentions. There was also Nomura, that got one-third of the loans in that order that were taken out. I think, on balance, the repo loans were like $20 billion and Nomura got $10 billion of them. And Cantor Fitzgerald was also in there. Well, what happened, apparently, was that while the Dodd-Frank Act was being rewritten by the Congress, Janet Yellen changed the wording around and she said, “Well, how do we define a general liquidity crisis?” Well, it doesn’t mean what you and I mean by a liquidity crisis, meaning the whole economy is illiquid. She said, “If five banks need to borrow, then it’s a general liquidity crisis.” Well, the problem, as she points out, is it’s the same three big banks, again and again, and again and again. And these are not short-term loans. She points out that they were 14-day loans; there were longer loans. And they were rolled over, not overnight loans, not day-to-day loans, not even week-to-week loans. But month after month, the Fed was pumping money into JP Morgan and Citibank and Goldman. But then she points out that, or at least she told me, that these really weren’t Citibank and Morgan Chase; it was to their trading affiliates. Now this is exactly what Dodd-Frank was supposed to prevent. Dodd-Frank was supposed to protect the depository institutions by trying to go a little bit to restore the Glass-Steagall Act that Clinton and the Obama thugs that came in to the Obama administration all got rid of. It was supposed to say, “OK, we’re not going to let banks having their trading facilities, the gambling facilities, on derivatives and just placing bets on the financial markets – we’re not supposed to help the banks out of these problems at all.” So I think the reason that the newspapers are going quiet on this is the Fed broke the law. And it wants to continue breaking the law. And that’s why these Wall Street banks fought so hard to get the current head of the Fed reappointed, [Jerome] Powell, because they know that he’s going to do what [Timothy] Geithner did under the Obama administration. He’s loyal to the New York City banks, and he’s willing to sacrifice the economy to help the banks. Because those are the clients of the New York Fed, the big New York banks. And that’s been the case ever since I was on Wall Street half a [century] ago. And Pam [Martens] is trying to expose how these banks are crooked, and really what the whole problem was. She points out that the Fed is supposed to make short-term loans, but these are long-term loans. And the banks are not structurally insolvent. Without them, they would have lost money. The FDIC could have come in and taken them over. And the depositors, the insured depositors, would have been OK, which is just exactly what Sheila Bair, who was head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, wanted to do under Obama, when she was blocked by Geithner. She sat with Geithner and Obama, and he said, “Look, I’m backed by the banks; forget the voters. Banks are my campaign contributors.” And he bailed out the banks and sacrificed, pushed the whole economy into what is now a 12-year recession basically, that is not improving at all. So what is happening now is part of the whole quantitative easing bit that has really been a disaster. And the crisis is the Fed is flooding the financial markets with credit in order to increase real estate prices, to increase mortgage lending, to enable the banks and the 1%, that own the private capital funds and the insurance companies and the banks, to continue making money. And the reason that that these three banks were bailed out was they had made bad bets against, apparently, insurance companies, and foreign banks. Apparently MetLife, and Prudential, and other insurance companies made bets as to which way the stock market would go, and they won and Chase lost, Citibank lost, and Goldman Sachs lost. And somebody else must have lost because in September of 2019, when all this was occurring, the overnight rate went up to 10%. Well, that means that someone had really made a bad bet and was technically on paper insolvent, and that nobody would lend to them. For 10% overnight money, that means that nobody’s going to lend to you. Everybody knows that you’re insolvent. And that was all hushed up at the time. Not a word of it in the paper. And this is such a touchy subject that, if the banks would begin to – if the newspapers and the media would begin to get into the explanation of how all this developed, that would sort of counter the whole Fed’s strategy, and the whole Democratic Party strategy, which is to support Wall Street, not the economy at large. BENJAMIN NORTON: And Professor Hudson, what you’re getting at here is that, these banks were engaged in very risky behavior. And essentially all of the indications appear to be that they kind of unleashed a financial crisis in late 2019. And then with the pandemic, they could conveniently blame it in the pandemic. I’m not saying – obviously, they didn’t cause the pandemic. But I’m saying that it was actually, in some ways, it was actually a savior for them, a life saver, because then they could say, “Oh, well, we didn’t cause a financial crash; it was the pandemic.” But we actually see signs that, in late 2019, before Covid even arrived in the United States – well, there’s even discussion about that, but before the first official case of Covid was identified in the United States – there was already a financial crisis, apparently, and the Fed was just trying to cover it up. MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the problem is that the Fed made sure that it didn’t have to release any of this data for two years, on the theory that after two years, nobody can remember what’s happening and it doesn’t matter anymore; it’s yesterday’s news. And so the material only just came out now. We’re always going to be two years behind. And if you’re two years behind, then the thieves are going to have plenty of time to cover up what they’ve done, borrow even more money, and it’ll be too late to do anything. The whole idea is not to make the Fed transparent, to make a wall of secrecy around the Fed, so that it can do with its pet banks, and bail out the banks that most Americans don’t think should have been bailed out by Mr. Obama in 2009, and certainly don’t think that they should be bailed out now, as long as the depositors and the regular companies in the real economy is kept safe. But the Fed isn’t saving the real economy. It’s saving the gamblers. BENJAMIN NORTON: And Professor Hudson, there’s an incredible line, an incredible paragraph in this article that I want to get up here, that says a lot about not just the US economic system, but also the media. The last paragraph of this piece: “Why might such an outcome be a problem for media outlets in New York City? Three of the serially charged banks (JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup) are actually owners of the New York Fed – the regional Fed bank that played the major role in doling out the bailout money in 2008, and again in 2019. The New York Fed and its unlimited ability to electronically print money, are a boon to the New York City economy, which is a boon to advertising revenue at the big New York City-based media outlets.” I didn’t know – it’s pretty incredible. I knew that, obviously, the Fed is this kind of public-private, complex – whether or not it’s public or private, I know that people say it’s neither and both. So it’s confusing. Maybe you could explain that. But I didn’t know that JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup are owners of the New York Fed. MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, technically the Fed stock – all the banks have to own Federal Reserve stock; so it doesn’t matter that they’re owners. The ownership isn’t all that important for the Fed. Because the Fed is really a government organization. But the problem is that Wall Street has taken over the government. And it has taken over the Fed not through its ownership; it doesn’t have shares to vote as to who is going to be the head. The heads are appointed in Washington; they’re appointed by Congress. I talked to Pam [Martens] about that and she said because her site was so overloaded, she couldn’t get on it to write more last night, when it was up. And she has other theories. I thought that it’s the tail wagging the dog to say, well, look, it’s about advertising. The banks don’t do that much advertising, and nobody is going to kill a whole big story like this for the ads. And so, when we talked, she said she thinks part of the problem is margin loans. I mean, there are all sorts of problems that could have happened there. And the banks have been, again, operating if not illegally, then, let’s say, stretching the envelope, by pretending that what really are margin loans to help people buy stock are really disguised, or somehow their lawyers have drawn up these contracts as derivatives contracts. And a derivative you can lend 50% against, instead of just 15% for margin loans. So the banks actually have been working around the whole spirit of the law to make much larger loans than they should have. And when the stock market, as you have been watching, back then is doing what it’s doing today; it’s zigzagging, up and down, and up and down in a zigzag. That’s how you make money: Push it up, computerized buying; push it down, computerized selling. And one part of it was other banks venturing not only into derivatives but into the margin loans. I don’t think the ownership can control management. It’s not that Citibank and Chase can say, “Well, we own the majority stock in the Fed, so we’re just going to appoint one of our own guys as manager.” They don’t have to. They’ll give money to the Biden administration, and Biden will appoint their people. So the Fed is really controlled by the government, and all you have to do is give a campaign contribution to the government, and you get whatever you want. And I think Pam [Martens] would agree with that analysis. So that really should be the emphasis, not the banks, not that the New York Times is after more advertising money from Chase. I think there is more bank advertising on television than there is in the newspapers. And also, I think the the older reporters that used to know how to read a financial balance sheet, they’re all retired or they’re not working anymore. Or if they get too close, too embarrassing, and write columns like Pam [Martens] does, all of a sudden, they’re not working for the same organization anymore. So I think people just don’t understand what a repo is, how it’s connected to the money supply – and it isn’t – how it’s connected to quantitative easing. There is just a general economic illiteracy. Because if you get an economics degree in academia, they don’t talk about money, or debt, or credit. None of this appears. None of this is in your money in banking course. It’s all sort of a Mickey Mouse Walt Disney Happy World, where nothing like this occurs. And so how is a reporter going to know how to do the research that Pam goes into year after year? Taking apart all these balance sheets and doing all the analysis you have to do to net out what’s actually happening from the whey. When IBM was fighting an antitrust suit – this must have been 50 years ago – and the government wanted some information from it, IBM through, “We’ve got to give the government information. What are we going to do?” So it gave two huge storerooms of hard printout of information that would have taken five years to go through. Well that’s what the Fed did with these statistics. It gave such a mass of information that you had – it was like looking for a needle in a haystack in order to find it. And as newspapers have been run more like profit-making companies, they have cut the costs. They don’t have the time to do the research to find the needle in the haystack. And since Pam [Martens] doesn’t work for a newspaper that’s under that cost constraint, she knows just what she’s looking for and goes right to it. BENJAMIN NORTON: And Professor Hudson, let’s talk about the inflation crisis and if this is related to it. We we had you on in early 2020 to talk about the CARES Act, and the so-called bailout, that was, as you said, basically a multi-trillion-dollar giveaway to the financial sector. And I believe that’s an addition to the $4.5 billion in the repo loans that we’re talking about. MICHAEL HUDSON: Yeah, that wasn’t the Federal Reserve; that was Treasury spending, not the Federal Reserve. They’re completely separate. BENJAMIN NORTON: Exactly. So we’re talking about over $10 trillion, between the two, over $10 trillion that went to the financial sector in the span of less than a year, in six months or so, from late 2019 to early 2020. Do you think that that is one of the main reasons for the inflation? I want to preface by saying that a point that you often stress, which I think is important to keep in mind, is that, the way inflation is measured frequently, at least in the United States, is that it doesn’t include things like the housing sector. And you have often pointed out for years that there has been a lot of inflation over the past several years in the FIRE sector. And real estate prices are a clear example of that. But that’s not considered the consumer price index. So go ahead. MICHAEL HUDSON: It actually is included, but in a very moderate way, modest way. I’ve looked at the Fed statistics on rent as a portion of income and mortgage payments as a portion of income. And in the last 30 years, there’s been zero change, according to these statistics. Absolutely flat. So they decided what the percentage was; they haven’t changed it at all. The consumer price index doesn’t recognize the increase in either rental costs or mortgage costs as housing prices have risen. So they’re under-reported. But more important, people have had to change what they’re eating and what they’re buying. But it’s certain, the money that the Fed gave to individual families under the CARES Act, almost all of that was used to pay down debt. Because the way the Treasury made the payments was to credit either their credit cards or their bank accounts. And that most Americans are overdrawn on their bank accounts, or they owe money on their credit cards. And the money went right out of their hands to reduce the volume of debt they had. And essentially, it was a debt repayment to the bank. That was what happened to most of the CARES Act. It wasn’t spent on goods and services, and so it wasn’t inflationary. Just the opposite. So there are a number of reasons why prices have gone up. The big reason is, if you look at the prices that have gone up, they’re monopoly prices. The monopolies have been able to charge more because they’re monopolies, and because there’s less and less competition, and because the government is not really enforcing anti-monopoly legislation. President Biden is trying to increase that now, but it’s going to take a little while before the prosecution of monopolies and talk of break-ups really concludes. Also there are a lot of bottlenecks in transportation, as you’ve heard. There are two kinds of bottlenecks: One, you’ve heard about the port in Los Angeles, over the ships. The shipping costs have tripled from Asia to the United States. The ships are unable to unload because the ports are not organized as ports. Particular companies own the trucks; other companies own the containers; other companies own the ships. And there is no way to reconcile them to get the containers that are offloaded from the ships once they’re emptied out, there’s no way to get them back. You have to get them back to particular terminals, and it’s not designed by anybody who is competently put there. The one benefit to the whole economy of all this is that it means that there’s no chance that the secretary of transportation, Mayor Pete [Buttigieg], can ever show his face in public again. But that’s sort of a minor gain. The other fact is that in companies, there’s a new management philosophy that’s come in, maybe about 15 years ago, and that’s called just-in-time inventory. In other words, the idea is, you want to cut – the less you spend on inventories, the more money you have to pay out as dividends to your stockholders. If you don’t have to spend money on inventories, then your profit rates go up, and you can pay more. And so companies say, “Let’s operate with almost no inventories at all. That way, we’ll have a little bit more money to push up the stock price.” And if you’re the CEO, you get your bonus paid on the stock price. Well, the problem is that the purpose of inventories is to prevent zigzags in prices, when there are shortages. If there is a supply problem, well, you have enough inventories on hand so that you are not going to have a crisis. That’s why the United States has a national inventory of oil, and fuels, and national reserves of things that the government and the economy needs. But Walmart, and other stores, and distributor retail stores don’t operate in the same way for the economy. They’re after profits. So they didn’t have any inventories. So a little bit of a shortage all of a sudden caused a massive scramble to try to get enough goods to sell to people. And so it’s that just-in-time budgeting. And also, of course, there are labor shortages from Covid. People are finally beginning to get almost half of the minimum wage; some people are almost able to earn the minimum wage now. Where there is a real labor shortage, in New York City, the transport authority said it’s paying its workers an extra $35,000 to retirees, if they’ll sign on for three months to get over the current shortage. So a little bit is, finally, the class war against labor is alleviated because of the crisis. So those are the real reasons of inflation. It’s not a monetary inflation, except for the financial inflation of housing prices, and the fact that it has created so many multi-billionaires by the Fed’s quantitative easing, that they’ve all created private capital buyout funds, and they’re buying up all the housing and outfitting the owner occupants that want to buy housing, to take over the housing, turn it into rental housing, and charge cutthroat rents to the economy. BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, it’s pretty interesting, Professor Hudson, because if you listen to Fox News, or a lot of right-wing analysis, they say that the problem behind the inflation is that the Biden administration is just spending so much money, and he’s a socialist, and he’s funding all of these programs, and Build Back Better. And it’s hilarious because, meanwhile, his own party won’t even approve the watered down version of Build Back Better, which is like every few weeks there’s a trillion dollars less, and then less spending, and less spending. So it’s pretty funny considering that his own party is preventing social spending, and then Republicans are claiming that he’s doing all this social spending, which is creating inflation. I want to point out a graph, an analysis that was done by this really good analyst named Stephen Semler; he’s got a good Substack where he focuses on the Military-Industrial Complex. And he did this study here called “Biden over-delivered on military spending and under-delivered on social spending.” And here this graph really visualizes the disparity, where Biden, when he campaigned, he pledged $700 billion for human and physical infrastructure and has only delivered $55 billion, a tiny fraction. And he campaigned pledging $741 billion for the Pentagon and just delivered a $778 billion dollar military budget. So while the right wing is freaking out and claiming that Biden is a socialist, spending all this money on social programs, in fact that money is going toward increasing the military budget, and not going to social programs. I don’t know if you wanted to comment on that. MICHAEL HUDON: Sure, I think that Schumer has a great influence over the Republican Party, and I think Schumer and Pelosi meet with their counterparts at the Republicans and say, “Please call us a socialist. We’re not going to disagree with you.” Because they know that 85% of Americans like the word socialism. And the more that Republicans call them socialist, that helps them solidify the base that really wants socialism, so that the Democratic Party can throw cold water on that and prevent socialism. It’s a great scam. BENJAMIN NORTON: That’s an interesting point; it’s an interesting idea. MICHAEL HUDSON: But actually, the Biden administration, they haven’t spend money into the economy. Spending money into the FIRE sector – the finance, insurance, and real estate sector – isn’t spending money into the economy; it’s spending money into the overhead that is preventing the economy from growing. Just the opposite. And to be fair to Biden, he hasn’t followed through on any of his other campaign promises, either. He hasn’t cut back student debt like he promised. He hasn’t raised the minimum wage like he promised. So it would be unfair to single out just the infrastructure. He has universally repudiated every campaign promise that he made, because his clientele are the campaign contributors, not the voters. BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, excellent point. He also, according to a recent study just published yesterday, on January 3, he also has increased deportation of immigrant children by 30% compared to Trump. He didn’t end the war in Yemen; has continued selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. Professor Hudson, you mentioned something important, that is quantitative easing. For those of us who are not economics experts. Can you explain what quantitative easing is? I just want to get this graph here. So before doing this interview, I wanted to listen to what kind of mainstream business news outlets were saying. This is a graph from Yahoo Finance. And they were talking all about the Fed interest rate, and they said that the Fed is planning on increasing the interest rate three different times this year, potentially. And you can see a graph here of close to zero interest from around 2008 until really 2020 or so. So it does look like it might be slightly increasing interest rates, but do you think that’s smoke and mirrors, or do you think that’s actually a significant factor? MICHAEL HUDSON: Quantitative easing is a significant factor because it has been a huge subsidy to the financial sector. It’s a bad term. It was supposed to be – what quantity is easing? Not the money supply, because all this is occurring on the Fed’s balance sheet. It means that the Fed is letting banks pledge their junk mortgages, their bonds, and their stocks in exchange for Federal Reserve deposits that they can use to increase their lending base. And the official original reason in 2009 was the Fed said, we’ve got to have higher housing prices. Americans are only spending maybe 35% of their rent of their income on rent and housing. We’ve got to increase that to 43%. So if we can lower the interest rates, people can take out larger and larger mortgages, and there will be a huge flood of lending into the mortgage market, and Americans will have to pay more for their housing. And that will make the banks richer, the insurance companies richer, and our clients in the financial sector richer. So quantitative easing was designed to increase the price of housing to Americans, and then it was to create a huge stock market boom. And the banks had lost so much money through their junk mortgage lending and their insurance, their plain fraudulent loans, as Bill Black has pointed out at University of Missouri at Kansas City, that they said, “We’ve got to have the banks make back the trillions of dollars they’ve lost. And so we’re going to have quantitative easing to give them enough money to gamble with, that they can make money at the expense of the public at large, and the pension funds, and other people.” So quantitative easing was part of the war of the financial sector against the economy at large. And it just provides a lot of credit. If you have interest rates at 0.1%, then you can buy stocks that are yielding 5% or 7% or 10%, or you can borrow at 0.1% and buy a junk bond. And junk bond rates went down from about 15%, down to maybe 5% today. It’s all arbitrage. People are borrowing low from the Fed and from the banks that borrow from the Fed to essentially buy higher yielding securities. And this is this is what has pushed up the stock market. It’s not going up because the economy is getting better. It’s going up because the Fed has been inflated. The Fed’s aim is inflation. But it doesn’t want to inflate the economy, real prices, it wants to inflate stock and bond and real estate prices, for the 1%. So essentially, this is part of the war of the 1% against the 99%. They’ve got almost all the growth in wealth since the pandemic began. There has been about, I think, $1 trillion growth, more than that, in the private wealth. All of this wealth that has been created has been basically taken by the 1%, who have made it financially, through financial capital gains, rising prices for their stocks, bonds, and real estate, not by the economy at large. The economy at large, the 99%, have had to go further and further into debt during the pandemic. And once the moratorium on rent and mortgage payments expires in a month or so, there is going to be a huge wave of evictions, not only of renters, but even of homeowners that couldn’t afford to make their mortgage payments. And there’s going to be just a huge explosion. Well, the Fed’s job in an election year is always to help re-elect the president. Whether it’s a Republican president or a Democratic president, it doesn’t matter because they’re basically the same party, but it’s always to re-elect the sitting president. And so the Fed is not going to raise interest rates this year because once the Fed raises interest rates, then people are not going to borrow to buy stocks and bonds anymore. If they can’t make an arbitrage speculative gain by borrowing at 1% to buy a stock yielding 5%, they’ll sell the stock. And if they sell the stock, it’ll go down. And at a certain point, the Fed is running a pump and dump operation, and we’re going to get to the pump stage, quantitative easing, to the dump stage, when the insiders will say, “OK, time to raise interest rates Fed. Let’s raise them now.” They’ll sell out and the market will plunge, and people will say, “Nobody could have foreseen this.” BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, Professor Hudson, the kind of conventional bourgeois economics wisdom, if you’re just reading the business press, is that when there’s high inflation, the Fed should increase interest rates. And my understanding, at least according to reading the kind of conventional business press, is that the reason the Fed, at least the reason they claim, that the Fed reduced interest rates so low after the crash of 2008 was to help the economy grow. You can see the graph here showing the Fed interest rate, and it’s been pretty static, at close to 0%, really until the pandemic, and its slightly increased. But still even compared to the 1990s, when the interest rate was around 5 or 6%, or in the 1980s when the interest rate fluctuated, but was almost as high as 20%. I mean, even though the Fed has slightly increased interest rates recently, or it’s still talking about a fraction of 1%. It’s nothing compared to what the interest rates have been in the in the 1980s. So why is why is it? I mean, I think it’s pretty clear, given the answer you just said, but maybe you can further expand. What is the excuse they’re giving for not increasing interest rates further, if they want to supposedly combat inflation? MICHAEL HUDSON: They don’t have an excuse. They have a pretense. They have a cover story. And the cover story is trickle-down economics: We’ve just made enormous billions, trillions of dollars for the 1%, and it’s all going to trickle down. None of this has been spent into the economy, and they say, “We don’t have to spend it in the economy.” The Treasury doesn’t need Biden’s Build Back Better plan. All we need is to make more stock market gains and the 1%, maybe say the 10% of the population that owns most of the stocks, now they’ll have enough money to buy more Andy Warhol etchings, and rare art, and expensive wines, and things like that, and it’ll all trickle down. That’s not really an excuse; it’s so unrealistic; it’s parallel universe talking. But that’s the cover story. And it’s backed by everything that economics students are taught when they get an economics degree in the university. So who’s to puncture their balloon and say, “Wait a minute, here’s what’s really happening”? Well, you know your show; you have Pam Martins’; you have a couple of other sites. But the economy is living in a dream world, and propaganda is the name of the game. BENJAMIN NORTON: Professor Hudson, let’s switch topics a bit here. I want to talk about an issue that we frequently address with you, I think it’s very important, and that is de-dollarization. This is an interesting article that was just published in Nikkei, which is a Japanese website focused on business. This is Nikkei Asia. And they have this article just published December 29: “Central banks accelerate shift from dollar to gold worldwide.” They say “holdings rose to a 31-year high in 2021.” The dictatorship of the US dollar is weakening: "Central banks around the world are increasing the gold they hold in foreign exchange reserves" Central banks have built up gold reserves by 4,500 tons over the past decade, to the highest level since 1990 https://t.co/QltI92x33X — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 2, 2022 Let me summarize a few of the main points here. They say, “Central banks around the world are increasing the gold they hold in foreign exchange reserves, bringing the total to a 31-year high in 2021.” And they “have built up their gold reserves by more than 4,500 tons over the past decade.” As of this September, this past September 2021, the reserves totaled 36,000 tons, the largest since 1990, and up 15% from a decade earlier. So why do you think central banks are are shifting to gold? MICHAEL HUDSON: They’re protecting themselves against US political aggression. The big story last year was – if a country keeps its reserves and US dollars, that means they’re holding US Treasury securities. The US Treasury can simply say, “We’re not going to pay you.” And even when a country like Venezuela tried to protect itself by holding its money in gold, where is it going to hold it? It held it at the Bank of England. And the Bank of England said, “Well, we’ve just been told by the White House that that they’ve elected a new president of Venezuela, Mr. Guaidó. And we don’t recognize the president that the Venezuelans elect, because Venezuela is not part of the US orbit.” So they grabbed all of Venezuela’s gold and gave it to the basically fascist opposition, to the ultra right-winger. The Americans say, “We’re going to recognize an opposition leader; we’re going to pick him out of thin air and take all the money away from Venezuela.” Countries all over, from Russia to China to the Third World, think the United States is going to just grab our money, any time at all. The dollar is a hot potato, because the US, basically, it looks like, is prepping for war over the Ukraine; it’s prepping for war with Russia; it’s prepping for war with China. It has declared war on almost the entire world that does not agree to follow the policies that the State Department and the military dictate to it. So other countries are just scared, absolutely scared of what the United States is doing. Of course, they’re getting rid of dollars. The United States said, “Well, you know, if we don’t like what Russia does, we’re going to cut off the banking contact with the SWIFT, the interbank money transfer system.” So if you do hold your money in dollars, you can’t get it. I guess the classic example is with Iran. When the Shah was overthrown. Iran’s bank was Chase Manhattan Bank, which I was working for, as a balance-of-payments analyst. And Iran had foreign debt that it paid promptly every three months, and so it sent a note to the bank, “Please pay our bondholders.” And Chase got a note from the State Department saying, “Don’t do what Iran wants; don’t pay.” So Chase just sat on the money. It didn’t pay the bondholders. The US government and the IMF declared Iran in default of paying, even though it had all the money to pay the bondholders. And all of a sudden, they said now Iran owes the entire balance that’s due, on the theory that if you miss one payment, then you default, and we’re going to make Iran do what the Fed didn’t make Chase Manhattan, and Citibank, and Goldman Sachs do. They couldn’t pay and transfer, but they weren’t pushed under bankruptcy. So by holding your money in the US bank, the US bank does whatever the government tells it to, and it can drive any country bankrupt at any point. If other countries pass a tariff against US goods that the US doesn’t like, it can just essentially not pay them on whatever they hold in the United States, whether they hold reserves in American banks, or whether they hold reserves in the Treasury or the Fed, the United States can just grab their money. And so the United States has broken every rule in the financial book, and it’s a renegade; it’s a pirate. And other countries are freeing themselves from piracy by saying, “The dollar is a hot potato. There is no way that we can believe them. You can’t make a contract with the American government.” Ever since the Native Americans tried to make land contracts in the 19th century with them, the United States doesn’t pay any attention to the contracts signed. And President Putin says it’s “not agreement capable.” So how can you make a financial arrangement with a country whose banks and State Department and financial department are not agreement capable? They’re bailing out. And what’s the alternative? Well, the only alternative is to hold each other’s currencies, and to do something that, for the last 2,000 years, the world has liked gold and silver, and so they’re putting their money into gold because it’s an asset that doesn’t have a liability behind it. It’s an asset that, if you’re holding it, not England, not the New York Fed – the German government has told the New York Fed, “Send us back to the gold that we have on deposit there for safekeeping. It’s not safekeeping anymore. Planeload after planeload of gold is being flown back to Germany from the U.S., because even Germany – satellite as it is – is afraid that the United States may not like something Germany does, like if Germany imports gas from Russia, will America just grab all its gold and say, “You can’t have it anymore; we’re fining you.” The United States has become lawless. And so of course you can’t trust it; it’s like a wild cat bank in the the 19th century. BENJAMIN NORTON: And Professor Hudson, something that you’ve talked about in our various interviews with you over the past few years, which proved to be very prescient, is that China and Russia were in the process of trying to develop a new financial architecture to get around the U.S.-controlled financial system. And they have officially announced that publicly. Anyone who follows our show would have known that a few years ago, because you have been pointing this out for well over a year now. But this is an article that was published this December in the Global Times, which is owned by the People’s Daily, so it’s very close to the Communist Party of China, and it represents the perspective of a certain wing of the Communist Party of China. And the article is titled “China and Russia to establish independent financial systems.” And they also quote Russian media; it was reported in RT as well. Russia and China are developing an alternative to the US-controlled global financial system, to weaken US sanctions This will "deter the threat of the US government's long-arm jurisdiction based on the US dollar-denominated international payment network"https://t.co/suWDWwwLvk — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 17, 2021 And very briefly, to summarize the article, they say that “Russia and China have agreed to develop shared financial structures to deepen economic ties in a way that will not be affected by the pressure of third parties.” And we all know when they say third parties, they mean the United States. And they also talk about how this is to “deter the threat of the U.S. government’s long arm jurisdiction based on the U.S. dollar-denominated international payment network.” And they also reveal that they’re trying to drop the dollar in their business, in the business that China and Russia do with each other. And then here’s another article to complement this. This was in Turkish state media back in July of 2021: “Russia accelerates de-dollarization move.” Russia accelerates de-dollarization move https://t.co/TFhMdAni9w pic.twitter.com/WVLnBd1Yek — ANADOLU AGENCY (@anadoluagency) June 7, 2021 And they talk about how Russia at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, President Putin accused the U.S. of using the dollar as a tool of economic and political warfare. And he said “the US will regret using the dollar as a sanctions weapon.” And he pointed out that that Russia’s oil companies are trying to stop using the currency. And the country’s finance minister, Anton Siluanov, said Russia will completely divest its dollar assets in the National Welfare Fund. And he said – this is a huge quote – “We have decided to get out of dollar assets completely, replacing investments in dollars with an increase in euros and gold.” So this is something that you’ve talked about. Maybe do you have more insight on and the attempts by China and Russia to de-dollarize, and also to, at the same time, create a new financial architecture? MICHAEL HUDSON: Think of it more as President Trump, followed by President Biden, forcing Russia and China to de-dollarize, by threatening explicitly – and that was made a month ago again – of cutting them off from SWIFT, the inter-bank transfer system, officially run out of Brussels, right at NATO headquarters. And the idea is, when you write a check to somebody, you write a check, they put it in their bank; all that goes through the SWIFT system. Well, the SWIFT system covers basically the whole world. It’s a computerized system so that banks can transfer money. You can send money to England, or to Russia or China; or Russia and China can send money back and forth. Well, the problem they had is Trump and his secretary again and again and again threatened to cut Russia off from SWIFT. The U.S. government kept saying, “We can create a crisis with you. We don’t have to bomb you. We don’t have to beat you militarily. We can just paralyze your financial system by cutting you off from SWIFT.” So what they have done is say, “OK, I guess we’d better create our own financial clearing system and bank clearing system well enough that, if you close us down, we’ll have another parallel system ready to go.” It’s as if you’re all using MasterCard and you want to shift the Visa, and you say, “OK, just in case the MasterCard decides it doesn’t like us, we’re going to use a Visa account to transfer money.” So they’ve created their own alternative, ready to go. It costs a lot of money to develop a huge computerized payment system. But since Russia, China, Iran, and the whole Asian grouping has decided, “Well, wait a minute, most of our payments are among ourselves. If China is paying Thailand, or South Korea, or Russia, buying and selling with them, why does it need to do it in US dollars and have a reserve that is lent to the US Treasury to essentially use the dollars to spend abroad and finance all of its military encirclement of these various areas?” So they said, any dollars we hold, that’s a loan to the U.S. Treasury. And the loan enables the dollar to be spent on militarily encircling us, so they can say, “If you break away from the dollar, we’re going to use our military bases that we spent your dollars on to bomb you.” So they’re breaking free of the whole dollar system. And that’s the whole premise of my book “Super Imperialism,” as we’ve discussed before on the show. So that they’re decoupling from the U.S. economy as much as they can. And in any case, they say, “Look, the U.S. economy is going down quickly. Both parties, Democrats, and Republicans, are in agreement that the economy has to shrink by about 20%, in order to pay all of the debts that the 99% owe to the 1%.” So the U.S. economy is not going to be a very good market for it anymore. We don’t need it. It doesn’t need us. Let North America go its way; we’ll go our way. And that’s that’s exactly what’s happening in the world. There’s a global fracture. BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, you referred to the recent crisis in Ukraine, where essentially NATO and the hardcore right-wing nationalists in Ukraine are really trying to cause this conflict in the Donbass region, in the east. And then they’re falsely claiming that Russia is going to invade. I mean, this is all a pretense, of course, to justify further aggression against Russia and punitive actions. And then recently, there’s been this discussion, that you acknowledged, of the so-called nuclear option, which is decoupling Russia’s economy, disconnecting the economy from the SWIFT system. And when Russia and China announced their development of a new financial system, it was effectively in response to those news reports that the US government and the EU were talking about the “nuclear option” of removing Russia from SWIFT. And what’s interesting is that Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary general of NATO, has made it clear that they’re not going to militarily challenge Russia over the Donbass, over Ukraine, that if there’s a military conflict – which would likely, by the way, be caused by Ukraine, not by Russia; Russia has made it very clear it has no intention of invading Ukraine – but if the hardcore right-wing nationalists in Ukraine decide they want to attack the Donbass. Russia has said that it would respond. And then the response would be from NATO not military intervention, but disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT system, which they call the nuclear option. Which is actually quite interesting, because it would be basically dropping a nuke on the US-controlled financial system, and would be the final straw that would officially decouple Russia and China from the US-controlled financial system. I think it’s a very interesting moment, because we’ve had you on Professor Hudson for the past few years talking about this issue, of de-dollarization, the attempt to decouple the Chinese and Russian economies from the US- and the EU-dominated financial system. And we’ve really seen in the past few months, I think, an acceleration of that. So do you anticipate – I mean, when people interview me, I hate when people ask me questions about the future, as if I can, you know, predict what’s going to happen – but given what’s happening right now politically with Ukraine – I mean, there are talks that are happening this week between the US and Russia, so it does seem that the Biden administration is trying to put some brakes on, to prevent this from accelerating further. But do you think that this year, in the months that come, that we could actually see that nuclear option used, that Russia could be disconnected from SWIFT. And if it is, what would the consequences be? MICHAEL HUDSON: Well it’s pretty late now because they’ve been talking about it now for so many years that Russia and China have had a chance to put in their own system. Johnson’s Russia list is a list of all of the big articles in Russia every day. And if you’ve been following that, Russia has already said, “Well, yeah, it’ll be an interruption for a while. It’s not going to be like a nuclear bomb. It’ll be more like a stink bomb.” So they’re going to drop a stink bomb on Russia, but that’s not the most serious thing in the whole world. So Russia and China by now have had enough opportunity to protect themselves from this. But from what you said earlier – never, ever quote anything Stoltenberg says. His job is – I won’t even use the word. But the Americans already have troops in Ukraine. Their special operation forces, they’re in Ukraine. The U.S. has already hired I guess what used to be Blackwater troops, mercenaries; they put them in Ukraine. So the U.S. is fighting on the side of the Ukrainian Nazis against Russia. Russia said two weeks ago that the U.S. special forces were planning a false flag chemical attack, and it said the city and the time. And it said, if you do that, we’re just going to come in and bomb. So Russia found out about it and it stopped the false flag attack. But the U.S. has forces there. They thought that somehow they could provoke Russia into actually invading. I can guarantee you. I’m willing to lose my reputation if Russia actually invades Ukraine. It would be crazy. It doesn’t have the money to do it. It doesn’t have the troops. And who needs Ukraine? Russia has no need for Ukraine. And it’s a basket case. It has the lowest living standards in Europe. And on every U.S. international report, it’s the most corrupt country in Europe. Nothing can be done to help at all. Russia doesn’t have to attack it. All it has to do is let it – if somebody is committing suicide, you don’t stop it. Russia did say that if there is a military attack on the Donbass, we are going to respond with missiles, and the missiles will not necessarily be linked to Ukraine. We may bomb, for instance, Romania, where NATO has missile launchers. And Russia has made it clear you’re not going to go anymore with these salami tactics of moving NATO bit by bit. As far as Russia is concerned when America put special forces and troops there, when America gives Ukraine offensive weapons, as the Biden administration does, that is literally backing Ukraine, absorbing it into NATO informally. Whether it has signed the contract or not, it is working for; it is a satellite basically of the State Department. And so Russia says, Look, we’re going to go back to the sponsors. We’re not going to just hit the troops that hit Donbass; we’re going to hit their staging areas. And the staging areas may be to the west of Ukraine. That’s the message you should have. Russia won’t fight Ukraine; it’ll fight anywhere from Romania to Poland to Germany. BENJAMIN NORTON: A few more questions here, Professor Hudson, then we’ll wrap up. One is, we’ve seen a lot of reports in the business press recently about how the Chinese economy’s growth is slightly slowing down. And the last time we had you on, we talked about the property crackdown that was – it seemed to be that Beijing was trying to pop this property bubble before it burst. So there’s been discussion of China’s economic growth slightly slowing. But other analysts, especially actual experts and not the fake experts who are just actually anti-China activists who are portrayed as experts in Western media – actual experts have pointed out that what China seems to be doing is slightly slowing down growth in the short term, but maintaining stability and also increasing domestic consumption, increasing its economic resilience, so it’s not as reliant on exports. China and Russia also have been recently in talks discussing building a pipeline and Chinese importing of Russian gas and oil. So it seems that they’re really preparing, being honest, it seems to me that they’re preparing for economic warfare coming their way in the years to come. It seems that they understand that the years to come are going to be difficult, and they’re preparing for the storm, if you will. Do you agree with that analysis? And what do you see China doing with its economy? BENJAMIN NORTON: Well, I agree with the analysis. When I was in China 10 years ago, I was lecturing the students. I was very impressed by the fact that they said, already at that time, there was a lot of corruption in China, because it achieved growth by letting individuals make as much money as they can. And some people have made an enormous amount of money, and we’re going to change that. Well now they’ve grown up. Ten years later, they have risen within the Communist Party. And this year, there is going to be a very major Communist Party Central Committee meeting that is going to announce a new plan forward for China, the general prosperity plan. And the plan is to have prosperity for the 99%, not the 1%. And just as China has been closing down the Ant billionaires and the real estate billionaires, it’s now moving to essentially cut the wealth of the 1% and promote the wealth of the 99%. And you can see its success in doing that with the Covid epidemic. There’s hardly any Covid there compared to other countries, because it’s able to shut down, because its economic institutions are not aimed at making a profit, if they’re state financed, they’re aimed at helping the economy grow. And that’s the difference between socialism and America’s finance capitalism. BENJAMIN NORTON: Professor Hudson, if I can jump in for a second, I want to point out that, in 2021, two people in China died of COVID. Two. In the U.S., over 400,000 died of COVID. So it says everything about those priorities. And I also want to mention, you were talking about this shift in emphasis in China, they refer to it as common prosperity. MICHAEL HUDSON: Common prosperity. That’s exactly the program. And that’s what they’re really aiming at. And they’ve been preparing for that, and putting administrators in place for the last few years. And most of my lecturing in China is all about a tax policy to essentially prevent the kind of real estate bubble that you have in the United States by taxing away the land rent, so that it won’t be pledged to banks for credit. So China is moving much more to make the shift the central planning away from the banking system back into the government for government purposes of increasing prosperity. And of course, you mentioned the big pipeline that they’re developing with Siberia. That’s going to take about four years to build, but it’s going to make, essentially, Russia and China can be almost independent of Western Europe. Western Europe wants to remain a satellite of U.S. policy. Then Western Europe will go the same way that the United States is going. It’s going to be left out of all of this prosperity that is being created by the Belt and Road Initiative and by the fact that China is able to revive its economy. And even Russia is developing is broadening its economic base. BENJAMIN NORTON: And finally, to conclude our interview today, Professor Hudson, I want to point out an incredible article that was just published in Bloomberg. I have been sharing this a lot and commenting on it because it says so much about the U.S. government and the U.S. economy. This is published in Bloomberg. It was published on December 29. It is titled “[Kamala] Harris Quietly Taps Wall Street, Tech CEOs for Advice on Policy.” And that’s pretty euphemistic. VP Kamala Harris has increasingly turned to corporate executives from Wall Street and Silicon Valley to serve as informal advisers, policy allies and political boosters. https://t.co/Ss4JrNc5ID — Bloomberg Government (@BGOV) December 29, 2021 Basically, what the article reveals is that the US vice president is working directly with executives from large corporations to create policy. And I’ll just read a few paragraphs here: “Vice President Kamala Harris has increasingly turned to corporate executives from Wall Street and Silicon Valley to serve as informal advisors, policy allies, and political boosters as she grapples with a sprawling and at times intractable policy portfolio.” They mention executives from Microsoft, Cisco, and Citigroup, Citigroup being one of the major banks we talked about earlier, that received some of the $4.5 trillion in Fed repo loans. So do you want to comment on this revelation? I mean, it’s not surprising, but this revelation from Bloomberg that the US vice president is farming out her policy to executives from large corporations. MICHAEL HUDSON: It sounds like she is looking for campaign contributions to me, and saying, you know, I will continue to pay attention to you if you give me enough campaign funding that I can get elected over whoever the rival is going to be. But I mean, she has to do something with her time, and she is trying to just pacify big business on behalf of the Democratic Party and the Biden administration. So it just sort of pacifying, saying, we’re on your side. Forget what we put in our platform. Forget the campaign contributions between us. I’m on your side, not the voters. BENJAMIN NORTON: Great. Well, on that note, before we leave, there are a few comments, super chats with a few brief questions and then we can conclude here. This is from a Taste of Bass. Thanks for the super chat comment. They said, “Can you ask Professor Hudson about bitcoin? A lot of bitcoin promoters have been using Super Imperialism in their, I’d say, fallacious arguments.” What do you think about bitcoin? MICHAEL HUDSON: I don’t like it at all. I have nothing to do with it, and I just avoid all discussion of it even. You might as well buy Andy Warhol etchings. BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah we’ve asked you this before and you said it does seem to me that it’s just a bunch of speculation. And not only is it a bunch of speculation, but it seems to be a pretty unreliable investment considering how much the price fluctuates month by month. MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, let’s look at what they’re speculating on. They’re speculating on that the great growth industry of our time is crime, is drug dealing and its crime. And the criminals use bitcoin. And as they get richer and richer and put all the criminal savings into bitcoin, the price is going to go up and you can make a profit riding the crime wave. BENJAMIN NORTON: All right, well, I want to thank everyone who watched, everyone who commented. Like always it was a great discussion with Professor Michael Hudson. And you can go to michael-hudson.com to check out his articles, his interviews, and I would highly recommend going and reading his book “Super Imperialism.” And for those who want to who are kind of more visual or audio learners, you can go check out the interview that we did here with Professor Hudson on his book “Super Imperialism.” But I still think it’s important to read the book because there’s so much information in there. It really can change the way you see the world. So it’s always a pleasure, Professor Hudson. Do you want to plug anything before we wrap up? MICHAEL HUDSON: I can’t think of anything right now, except my “Killing the Host,” my book on the American economy. I mean, don’t just stop with one book. There are plenty there. You can check on Amazon. BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, his books are excellent. He has “J for Junk Economics,” “Killing the Host,” “…And Forgive Them Their Debts” and others. So definitely go to michael-hudson.com and check those out. And thanks to everyone, and we’ll see you all next time. MICHAEL HUDSON: Thanks for having me.

Write an article about: Global 1% own 43% of financial assets, 5 richest billionaires doubled wealth while 5 billion workers got poorer. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Bernard Arnault, capitalism, Elon Musk, inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, neoliberalism, Oxfam, Warren Buffett

The world’s richest 1% own 43% of global financial assets, and the wealth of the top five billionaires has doubled since 2020, while 60% of humanity got poorer, according to a report by Oxfam. The world’s richest 1% own 43% of global financial assets, and the wealth of the top five billionaires has doubled since 2020, while 60% of humanity – nearly 5 billion people – collectively got poorer, according to a report by Oxfam, a leading international humanitarian organization. Oxfam published the study, “Inequality Inc.”, to coincide with the World Economic Forum meeting of corporate oligarchs and Western government officials in Davos, Switzerland this January. The five richest people on Earth in 2023 were Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Warren Buffett. Their combined wealth skyrocketed from $340 billion in 2020 to $869 billion just three years later. Adjusted for inflation, this was a real increase of 114%. Oxfam found that the wealthiest 1% of the world population emit as much carbon pollution as the poorest two-thirds of the entire human population. “Only 0.4 percent of the world’s largest corporations are publicly committed to paying workers a living wage and support a living wage in their value chains”, the organization wrote. “While corporate profits are soaring, the wages of nearly 800 million workers around the world have failed to keep up with inflation, resulting in a loss of $1.5 trillion for those workers over the last two years”. Oxfam likewise discovered that seven out of 10 of the largest corporations on the planet either have a billionaire as their CEO or have a billionaire as their principal shareholder. “We are living through an era of monopoly power that enables corporations to control markets, set the terms of exchange, and profit without fear of losing business”, Oxfam cautioned. This growing inequality is especially clear in the differences between the Global North and South. “Rich people in the Global North still own the world”, Oxfam wrote. A staggering 69.3% of the world’s wealth is located in the Global North, which has just 20.6% of the planet’s population. Oxfam warned that the world capitalist “economic system has created a new type of colonialism”. “Many of the world’s super-rich are concentrated in countries that were once colonial superpowers. Neocolonial relationships persist, perpetuating economic imbalances and rigging the economic rules in favor of rich nations”, the anti-poverty organization wrote. It added, “Low- and lower-middle-income countries are set to pay nearly half a billion U.S. dollars a day in interest and debt payments between now and 2029, and they are having to make severe spending cuts to be able to pay their creditors”.

Write an article about: ‘Dollar suffered stunning collapse in 2022’: Share of global reserves fell to 47%, decreasing at 10 times rate. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Bloomberg, dollar, Eurizon, Financial Times, IMF, International Monetary Fund, Joana Freire, Stephen Jen

“The dollar suffered a stunning collapse in 2022 in its market share as a reserve currency”, largely due to US sanctions, falling from 73% of reserves in 2001 to 47% in 2022, according to economist Stephen Jen. Countries in the Global South are seeking economic alternatives in a multipolar world. Major financial media outlets in the West have acknowledged that “de-dollarization is happening at a stunning pace”. Countries around the world, especially in the Global South, are moving away from the US dollar, using other currencies in international trade settlements and diversifying their reserves. In fact, the dollar’s share of the foreign-exchange reserves held by central banks worldwide fell to 47% in 2022, a precipitous decline from 73% in 2001, according to a study by the renowned economist Stephen Jen. This is a historic shift that hasn’t been seen since World War II and the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which established the US dollar as the global reserve currency. Chinese President Xi Jinping hinted at this transition when he visited Moscow this March, telling Russian President Vladimir Putin, “Right now, there are changes the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years”. Bloomberg reported on April 18 that the “dollar is losing its reserve status at a faster pace than generally accepted as many analysts have failed to account for last year’s [2022’s] wild exchange rate moves”. The US currency’s share of global reserves decreased in 2022 “at 10 times the average speed of the past two decades as a number of countries looked for alternatives after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered sanctions”, the media outlet added. Bloomberg cited a study by the firm Eurizon SLJ Asset Management, which found that the “dollar has lost about 11% of its market share since 2016 and double that amount since 2008″. Eurizon economists Stephen Jen and Joana Freire stated, “The dollar suffered a stunning collapse in 2022 in its market share as a reserve currency, presumably due to its muscular use of sanctions… Exceptional actions taken by the US and its allies against Russia have startled large reserve-holding countries”. Jen previously served as a currency analyst at US investment bank Morgan Stanley. The Financial Times also published an article based on his study. The newspaper reported: “Jen estimates that if you adjust for price changes the dollar’s share of official global reserve currencies has gone from about 73 per cent in 2001 to around 55 per cent in 2021. Then, [in 2022], it fell to 47 per cent of total global reserves”. This change is significantly larger than what was previously acknowledged by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In a 2022 working paper titled “The Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance”, the IMF estimated that the US currency’s share of global foreign-exchange reserves fell from just over 70% in 2000 to slightly below 60% in 2021. But Eurizon’s estimates, which account for price changes, are even more dramatic. “The prevailing view of ‘nothing-to-see-here’ on the USD as a reserve currency seems too innocuous and complacent”, Jen and Freire wrote in their study. “If the US makes more policy errors and abandons the culture of self-examination, there will likely come a time when much of the rest of the world will actively avoid using the dollar”, they added. “Finally, what needs to be appreciated by investors is that, while the Global South is unable to totally avoid using the dollar, much of it has already become unwilling to do so”.

Write an article about: US Congress plots to save dollar dominance amid global de-dollarization rebellion. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Blaine Luetkemeyer, Congress, Daniel McDowell, dollar, Marshall Billingslea, Michael Faulkender, Tyler Goodspeed, Young Kim

The US Congress held a hearing titled “Dollar Dominance: Preserving the U.S. Dollar’s Status as the Global Reserve Currency”, as countries around the world join the de-dollarization rebellion against Washington’s “exorbitant privilege”. The US Congress held a hearing to discuss the growing international movement toward de-dollarization. Numerous lawmakers expressed concern over what they referred to as mounting “threats” to the “supremacy” of the dollar, warning that China and Russia are challenging the US-dominated international financial system. Economists invited to testify in the session cautioned that Washington’s aggressive imposition of unilateral sanctions has backfired, weakening dollar dominance by encouraging targeted countries to develop new, alternative financial institutions. Titled “Dollar Dominance: Preserving the U.S. Dollar’s Status as the Global Reserve Currency”, the June 7 hearing was organized by the House of Representatives Financial Services Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, Illicit Finance, and International Financial Institutions. The tone of the two-hour event was deeply schizophrenic. Speakers would triumphantly argue that the dollar remained unbeatable, that its hegemony was inevitable and natural, before a few minutes later complaining that foreign adversaries are conspiring to undermine it. A neoconservative political economist who spoke, Daniel McDowell, boasted of how the dollar is “the king of all currencies” and “a powerful symbol of American financial royalty”. Michael Faulkender, who served as Donald Trump’s assistant secretary of the Treasury for economic policy, declared in the session, “As assistant secretary, I told my team that the Treasury secretary proudly states that the dollar will never not be the world’s reserve currency, and our job is to make sure that’s true”. Representative Monica de la Cruz, a Republican from Texas, said dismissively, “Now this hearing comes at a critical time when some academics and naysayers are spreading theories that de-dollarization has begun, and that the beginning of the end has arrived for the dollar’s dominant role as a global reserve currency”. The session was chaired by Republican Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer, a hard-line anti-China hawk from Missouri. “The conversation around the dollar being the reserve currency is becoming louder and louder, as we have more and more I think threats to it”, he cautioned. Luetkemeyer boasted of the many “economic advantages” that dollar hegemony gives to the United States: The US dollar has been the preferred global currency since the end of World War Two, providing our nation inherent economic advantages, as well as responsibilities. Today, an estimated 88% of all currency transactions by value are conducted in US dollars. Among other things, this limits the risk of a balance of payments crisis, which inherently lowers our exchange rate risk. The dollar’s position also allows the United States and Americans to borrow at rates such as 50 to 60 basis points lower. Our currency strength not only benefits the United States government, but also helps American consumers by lowering the price of imported goods, resulting in an estimated $25 to $45 billion a year in savings. The bipartisan hearing was mostly dominated by Republicans, but it also featured some Democrats. The ranking member of the subcommittee, Ohio Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty, began the session saying, “Thank you to our witnesses for appearing here today to discuss the preservation of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency, a topic which we all agree is of the utmost importance”. Beatty’s rhetoric was less aggressive than that of Luetkemeyer, but she essentially echoed the same talking points, stating: The dominance and supremacy of the currency affords the United States numerous benefits, from reduced borrowing costs, to increased financial stability, to influence over global financial markets. It also allows us to leverage economic measures against those that seek to threaten our national security and foreign policy. Given the undeniable value of the U.S. dollar’s dominance, it is critical that we address the currency and the present threats to it. As we speak, foreign adversaries like Russia and China are actively working to undermine the U.S. dollar and cripple our global power and influence. We see this in Russia’s rapid accumulation of gold reserves over the last decade, as well as China’s development of non-SWIFT systems to settle and clear transactions involving the RMB. Furthermore, several other countries are pushing efforts to bypass use of the U.S. dollar and the U.S.-led financial system. That is why I agree that the subject of this hearing unquestionably deserves our time and attention in Congress and in this subcommittee. The hearing also featured testimony from Tyler Goodspeed, a right-wing economist who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers when Trump was president. Goodspeed boasted: The fact that 90% of all foreign exchange transactions continue to involve the United States dollar, and that global central banks continue to hold almost 60% of their foreign exchange reserves in U.S. dollars, confers net economic benefits on the United States economy. First, foreign demand for reserves of U.S. dollars raises demand for dollar-denominated securities, in particular United States treasuries. This effectively lowers the cost of borrowing for U.S. households; U.S. companies; and federal, state, and local governments. It also means that, on average, the United States earns more on its investments in foreign assets than we have to pay on foreign investments in the United States, which allows the United States to import more goods and services than we export. Second, foreign demand for large reserves of U.S. dollars and dollar-denominated assets raises the value of the dollar, and a stronger dollar benefits U.S. consumers and businesses that are net importers of goods and services from abroad. Third, large reserve holdings of U.S. currency abroad, in effect, constitutes an interest free loan to the United States worth about $10 to $20 billion per year. Fourth, the denomination of the majority of international transactions in U.S. dollars likely modestly lowers the exchange rate risks faced by U.S. companies. Fifth, given the volume of foreign U.S. dollar holdings and dollar-denominated debt, monetary policy actions by foreign central banks generally have a smaller impact on financial conditions in the United States than actions by the United States central bank have on financial conditions in other countries. Marshall Billingslea, the Treasury’s assistant secretary for terrorist financing under Trump, who also previously worked in the Pentagon, expressed concern that the central banks of China and Russia have been de-dollarizing their foreign-exchange reserves and instead buying other assets, such as gold, which cannot be easily sanctioned: If we look at what Russia did in the run-up to its further invasion of Ukraine, they began dumping ownership of Treasury bonds in 2018. In that year, they plummeted from $96 billion in holdings down to $15 billion. And they also started buying large amounts of gold. China is now … embarking on its own gold-buying spree. I haven’t seen the data for May, but April marked the sixth straight month of Chinese expansion in its gold holdings. And I’m not sure I believe the official figures. We have to recall that China is the dominant gold-mining player around the world, and half of those gold-mining companies are state-owned. So the actual size of China’s war chest, when it comes to gold reserves, may be far higher, in fact I suspect inevitably far higher than official numbers suggest. Last year, China also started dumping its treasuries. 2022 marked the largest or second-largest decrease on record, with a drop of about $174 billion, and China stood at the lowest level since 2010 in terms of its holdings. In the hearing, Billingslea also warned that, as China stockpiles gold in its foreign-exchange reserves, it could start issuing yuan-denominated contracts that are backed by gold: The thing I do worry – I come back to this fact that they’ve been buying a lot of gold – is that one of the things that they could do, which would be very concerning, if they wind up having larger reserves of gold than we we believe, is they could start issuing yuan-, or gold-denominated, gold-backed yuan contracts. That would further their ambition for introducing the yuan onto the world stage. Also present in the hearing was Daniel McDowell, an associate professor in the political science department at Syracuse University in New York, and author of the book “Bucking the Buck: US Financial Sanctions and the International Backlash Against the Dollar”. McDowell argued that, by imposing more and more sanctions on countries around the world, Washington is actually weakening the dominance of the dollar. The US has sanctions on nations that represent more than one-third of the global population and 29% of the world’s GDP. McDowell explained: Dollar preeminence and U.S. financial centrality are not without consequence for American coercive power, as you all know. With little more than the stroke of the president’s pen, or through an act of Congress, the U.S. government can use financial sanctions to impose enormous economic costs on targeted foreign actors, be they individuals, firms, or state institutions, by freezing their dollar assets or cutting them off from access to the banks through which those dollars flow. As the United States has increased its reliance on financial sanctions as a tool of foreign policy, it has provoked anti-dollar policy responses from our adversaries. Though such steps are unlikely to upend the dollar’s position as top international currency, including the reserve currency role, over time such policies could diminish the coercive capabilities that the United States derives from dollar centrality. Over the last two decades, the United States has used the tool of financial sanctions with increasing frequency. For example, in the year 2000 just four foreign governments were directly targeted under the U.S. Treasury country program, overseen by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC. Today, that number is greater than 20; and if we include penalties from secondary sanctions, the list gets even longer. The more that the United States has reached for financial sanctions, the more it has made adversaries in foreign capitals aware of the strategic vulnerability that stems from dependence on the dollar. Some governments have responded by implementing anti-dollar policies, measures that are designed to reduce an economy’s reliance on the U.S. currency for investment and cross-border transactions. While these measures sometimes fail to achieve their goals, others have produced modest levels of de-dollarization. Notable examples here include Russian steps to cut its dollar reserves and reduce the use of the dollar in trade settlement in the years leading up to its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, or China’s ongoing efforts to build its own international payments network based on the yuan – efforts that have taken on a new sense of urgency as Beijing has become more aware of its own strategic vulnerabilities from dollar dependence. … The growing number of states espousing anti-dollar viewpoints and adopting anti-dollar policies does threaten to weaken the future potency of U.S. financial sanctions. … Finally, whenever possible, U.S. financial sanctions should be coordinated with our allies in Europe and Asia, who should feel as if they are key stakeholders in the dollar system, and not vassals to it. Another Republican congresswoman who participated in the hearing, Young Kim from California, complained that China has developed other ways to provide financing to countries that don’t involve the US dollar. Kim singled out the currency swap-line agreements that the People’s Bank of China has signed with the central banks of other countries, such as Argentina, which is a way for Beijing to give liquidity or credit in yuan, bypassing Washington-dominated financial institutions like the SWIFT inter-bank messaging system: We should all be troubled by the increase of central bank swap-line agreements deployed by the People’s Bank of China [PBOC]. According to a 2021 PBOC report, it said that it has swap facilities with 40 countries, with a combined capacity of almost 4 trillion yuan, or about $570 billion dollars. And just a few days ago, Argentina, a country facing a deep currency devaluation and 109% annual inflation, they announced a deal to renew its currency swap line with China and double the amount it can access to nearly $10 billion dollars. So the PBOC justifies the swap lines as a way to force countries to utilize the yuan as a method of exchange. So I want to ask you, Mr. Billingslea, instead of liberalizing its capital account and allowing the yuan to be fully convertible into the currency exchange markets, the CCP has opted to increase its bilateral swap-line agreements to further internationalize its currency. So is there anything that the United States can do to slow down or reduce adaptation of the PBOC’s currency swap lines? All the participants in the hearing treated the hegemony of the US currency as desirable, arguing it must inevitably be maintained. The five expert witnesses who were invited insisted that there is no short-term threat to dollar dominance. The two-hour hearing did not address possible plans for the BRICS bloc to create a new international reserve currency. Instead, the participants only spoke of existing national currencies like the Chinese renminbi, Russian ruble, or euro as potential challengers to the US dollar – while ultimately dismissing all of them. The idea that BRICS could develop an international currency (similar to John Maynard Keynes’ idea of the Bancor) was not even raised as a possibility.

Write an article about: US pressures Saudi Arabia to sell oil in dollars, not Chinese yuan, amid Israel negotiations. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

China, dollar, Israel, Palestine, petrodollar, renminbi, Saudi Arabia, Wall Street Journal, yuan

As part of negotiations for Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel, the United States is demanding that Riyadh keep pricing its oil in dollars, not China’s renminbi or other currencies. The United States is negotiating behind the scenes with Saudi Arabia, pressuring the country to keep selling its oil in dollars. Washington is concerned that Riyadh may price its crude in other currencies, particularly China’s renminbi. Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s top three oil producers. Since the 1970s, Riyadh has agreed to sell its crude in dollars, helping maintain the greenback’s hegemonic status as the global reserve currency. The Wall Street Journal reported that the US is working on a diplomatic deal in which Saudi Arabia would agree to normalize relations with Israel’s apartheid regime. In return, Riyadh wants Washington to pledge to always protect it, as well as help in developing a nuclear program. Although the negotiations are ostensibly about Israel-Palestine, the Wall Street Journal noted that the US is using the deal to pressure “Saudi Arabia to impose limits on its growing relationship with China”. “The Biden administration is seeking assurances from Saudi Arabia that it will distance itself—economically and militarily—from China”, the newspaper added, citing anonymous US officials. In terms of Saudi-Chinese relations, Washington has three main demands, according to the Wall Street Journal: While many analysts have speculated that the US military will gradually leave West Asia, to prioritize the new cold war, the report emphasized that President Joe Biden’s “focus on the deal [with Saudi Arabia] is a reflection of his view that America has to remain a central player in the Middle East to contain Iran, isolate Russia for its war in Ukraine and thwart efforts by China to supplant Washington’s interests in the region”. The petrodollar system has been a key pillar holding up the hegemony of the US currency. The fact that countries that import oil need dollars to pay for it ensures steady demand for Washington’s currency around the world. This stabilizes the dollar, helping to finance the massive current account deficit the United States has maintained for decades. When most countries have a consistent trade deficit, their national currency depreciates against the currency they use to pay for imports. As the local currency weakens, this makes imports more expensive and exports cheaper, encouraging the country to balance its trade. However, the United States has long been able to maintain a gargantuan trade deficit with the rest of the world because there is so much demand for its currency. The petrodollar system is one important reason for this high demand for dollars (among several other factors – such as overwhelming US military power, the impression that the currency is a stable store of value, open capital markets with many investment opportunities, etc.). Countries by their current account balance, averaged from years 1980 to 2008 (red is a deficit, green is a surplus) When Saudi Arabia has a glut of dollars, it has historically deposited them in the US banking system, which in turn uses the excess currency to fund more loans. Saudi Arabia’s central bank also invests excess dollars it receives from crude sales in the purchase of Treasury securities, effectively financing US government spending. As Geopolitical Economy Report previously noted: In 1974, [US President Richard] Nixon sent his Treasury secretary, William Simon, to Saudi Arabia. “The goal” of the trip, Bloomberg explained, was to “neutralize crude oil as an economic weapon and find a way to persuade” Saudi Arabia “to finance America’s widening deficit with its newfound petrodollar wealth”. Washington signed a historic agreement with Riyadh, pledging to protect the Gulf monarchy in return for Saudi Arabia selling its oil exclusively in dollars, depositing those petrodollars in US commercial banks, and investing in Treasury bonds. Bloomberg explained: “The basic framework was strikingly simple. The U.S. would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending”. China is Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner, and the two nations have developed closer relations in recent years. For a decade, Beijing has bought more oil from the Persian Gulf than the United States. The region is very important for China’s energy security, providing the East Asian giant with one-third of its energy needs. This March, China helped broker a historic rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Washington was furious about the peace breakthrough, and has pushed Riyadh to re-join its aggressive containment strategy against Tehran. Geopolitical game changer: China’s Iran-Saudi peace deal is big blow to petrodollar and US economic hegemony Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Saudi Arabia in December 2022, where he signed agreements with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Arab League. In Riyadh, Xi announced that “China will continue to import large quantities of crude oil from GCC countries, expand imports of liquefied natural gas … and make full use of the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange as a platform to carry out yuan settlement of oil and gas trade”. Saudi Arabia’s finance minister confirmed for the first time in public this January that Riyadh is indeed considering selling oil in other currencies. However, although there has been a lot of speculation about this in the financial press, the Saudi government has not publicly announced any plans to price its crude in yuan or any other currency. In 2021, Saudi Arabia became an official dialogue partner of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The SCO is an important institution promoting Eurasian integration, and fellow members include China, Russia, India, and Pakistan. Iran became a full member of the SCO this July. Saudi Arabia is among of the three biggest oil producers in the world (along with the US and Russia). Iran has long been one of the top 10 producers of crude.

Write an article about: Brazil and Argentina preparing new Latin American currency to ‘reduce reliance on US dollar’. Use the themes and topics represented by the tags provided as guidance for the content. It's not necessary to include the exact tag words in the article, but the article should reflect the essence and context of these tags.

Andrés Arauz, Argentina, Brazil, CELAC, dollar, Financial Times, Latin America, Lula da Silva, MERCOSUR, Sergio Massa, Sur, UNASUR

Brazil and Argentina are making plans for a Latin American currency called the Sur, to “boost regional trade and reduce reliance on the US dollar”. Lula had pledged it while running for president. The governments of Brazil and Argentina are making plans to create a new currency for Latin America, called the Sur (“south” in English), according to a report in the Financial Times. Other countries in the region will be invited to use the currency. Their goal is to “boost regional trade and reduce reliance on the US dollar”, the newspaper noted, citing government officials. Argentina’s Economic Minister Sergio Massa told the Financial Times that the South American nations will soon “start studying the parameters needed for a common currency, which includes everything from fiscal issues to the size of the economy and the role of central banks”. Massa said they are preparing “a study of mechanisms for trade integration”. But he cautioned that it could take years to develop, and this is just “first step on a long road which Latin America must travel”. Brazil and Argentina will discuss the currency plans at the meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in Buenos Aires on January 24. Brazil has the largest economy in Latin America, and Argentina has the third biggest (after Mexico). Argentina-based Spanish economist Alfredo Serrano Manc, who directs a think tank dedicated to regional integration, the Latin American Strategic Center of Geopolitics (CELAG), told the Financial Times that “the path is to find mechanisms which substitute the dependence on the dollar”. He added that now is the moment, given that “there are many governments that are ideologically similar”, with left-wing leaders across Latin America. Me consultaron en @FinancialTimes para esta nota sobre los desafíos de la cumbre CELAC. La vía es buscar mecanismos para sustituir la dependencia del dolar. Y sí se puede si se quiere. Y más ahora que hay muchos gobiernos afines en lo ideológico. https://t.co/kXjklZgZ1b — Alfredo Serrano Manc (@alfreserramanci) January 22, 2023 Brazil’s leftist President Lula da Silva returned to power on January 1. During his electoral campaign, Lula had floated the possibility of creating a regional currency for trade. At a rally in May 2022, the Workers’ Party leader had said, “We are going to create a currency in Latin America, because we can’t keep depending on the dollar”. Lula revealed that it would be called the Sur. He added that it would not be based on the euro model, in that countries could maintain their sovereign domestic currency. Instead, the plan would be to use the Sur for regional trade, Lula said. Brazil’s left-wing leader Lula da Silva says if he wins the October presidential elections, “we are going to create a currency in Latin America,” called the Sur (“South”), to combat “the dependency on the dollar”https://t.co/NSgzcHtuBB — Geopolitical Economy Report (@GeopoliticEcon) May 7, 2022 After Lula won the October 2022 election, Ecuador’s left-wing politician and economist Andrés Arauz published a blueprint for a “new regional financial architecture” for Latin America. Arauz said the plan would be to revive regional institutions like the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) and the Banco del Sur (Bank of the South), and to create a Banco Central del Sur (Central Bank of the South) to oversee the new currency. The goal is “to harmonize the payment systems of” the countries that make up UNASUR in order “to carry out inter-bank transfers to any bank inside of the region in real time and from a cellphone”, he wrote. Arauz was a presidential candidate who came close to winning Ecuador’s 2021 election. He is also finishing a PhD in economics. Advising Brazil’s President-elect Lula, Ecuadorian economist and leftist presidential candidate @EcuArauz made a blueprint for a “new regional financial architecture” to unite Latin America, including a currency to challenge the hegemony of the US dollar https://t.co/o7L0fN236F — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 1, 2022 Argentina has suffered with odious debt owed to foreign colonial powers for 200 years. Today, Argentina is trapped in $44 billion of debt with the US-dominated International Monetary Fund (IMF). This dollar-denominated foreign debt has led to a constant drain of foreign currency out of Argentina, fueling high levels of inflation. Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández visited China and Russia in February 2022, seeking alternatives to the US-dominated financial system, and joining Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. Argentina has also applied to join the extended BRICS+ bloc, with Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Buenos Aires attended the group’s 2022 summits at Beijing’s invitation. As former president, Lula was himself a co-founder of the BRICS. China invited Argentina to attend the 2022 summits of the BRICS economic bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. Argentina’s ambassador says it’s a step toward “formal entry” to the grouping, an alternative to the US-dominated financial systemhttps://t.co/ilTBO37LQi — Geopolitical Economy Report (@GeopoliticEcon) May 9, 2022 Both Brazil and Argentina are already part of a South American trade bloc, known as Mercosur (Mercado Común del Sur, or Common Market of the South). Lula has for years emphasized the importance of economic and political integration of Latin America and the Caribbean. Immediately after returning to office in January, Lula moved to revive and strengthen regional institutions like CELAC, UNASUR, and Mercosur. Brazil’s previous far-right President Jair Bolsonaro had sought to sabotage these organizations, withdrawing or suspending the country’s membership and instead aligning the South American giant closely with the United States. Bolsonaro came to power thanks to two US-backed political coups in Brazil, including a parliamentary putsch against Workers’ Party President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the politically motivated imprisonment of Lula on false charges in the lead-up to the 2018 election. Soon after entering office, Bolsonaro traveled to Virginia to visit CIA headquarters. Fearing legal consequences in Brazil for his flagrant corruption and for policies that caused the mass deaths of citizens, Bolsonaro fled to Florida two days before his term ended. He has since been living in the United States as a fugitive from justice. Lula da Silva returns as Brazil’s president, calling to fight poverty and hunger, re-industrialize, strengthen the BRICS, and deepen Latin American integration. Far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro fled to Florida, fearing legal consequences for his corruptionhttps://t.co/RZYABG6oQY — Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 4, 2023