Bulletins and News Discussion from July 22nd to July 28th, 2024 - Fracas in Dhaka - COTW: Bangladesh

The industrial base of nations is ultimately what determines victors in war, regardless of whether it's WWI or WWII or the Civil War or whatever else. America probably does have the most advanced weapons in the world, but wunderwaffen don't matter if you can't replace them as well as your opponent can.

Can 2024 America and Europe outproduce 2024 Russia militarily? Not right now. They could, theoretically, but it would require a decline in the rate of profit, and America especially is allergic to that now more than ever. Not hard to see why politicians want war with China - it'd force the issue like nothing else.

Poseur is such a bougie way to spell poser

The analysis (as shown in the slides) is also completely wrong though.

This is no longer the gold standard era. Unlike the British empire, the US empire is special in that it is a global debtor - it gets what it wants simply by printing as much dollars as it could, in infinite quantity limited only by the world’s capacity in terms of real resources, labor and technology to sustain it.

It is not financed by petro-dollars. The dollar is simply a tool for hegemony, to subjugate other nations. Why does the US empire need to confiscate Russia’s dollar reserves to finance itself when it can simply print those dollars itself? The act of confiscation is a disciplinary tool, a weapon for financial warfare.

The US huge deficit means that it gets real, tangible products from the rest of the world simply by printing dollars, which are then collected by the rest of the world selling goods and services, made using their own labor and resources, to America.

Imagine being able to walk into any restaurant and store and order what you want, and pay with a blank piece of paper with your signature on it! It is only limited by how much you can consume and how much the restaurants/stores have to offer.

These exporter countries then have nowhere else to use the surplus dollars after spending a portion of them (since they’re not allowed to purchase critical US assets, anything that the US government doesn’t allow), and so the only way for those surplus dollars to go is to buy US long-term treasuries to earn a couple % of long-term interests.

A few countries have noticed how they’re collecting junk papers by having huge surplus, like China, which is why they have stopped buying US treasuries. China, for example, starts to lend them out to Belt and Road Initiative since 2013. But the whole point is that you’re still using the dollar. If you’re not storing them in US treasuries, you’re using them somewhere else to help dollarize the world. It is best to think of US treasuries (national debt) as a sink that soak up excess dollars that other countries couldn’t find a place to use them.

The huge surplus of China simply means that they send over vast quantity of real goods and services made using their labor and resources, and in exchange they receive junk dollars as I’ve explained above. This is not to say that China is not a beneficiary in this arrangement though - not in the form of accumulating dollar surplus, but through the industrialization from Western countries exporting their manufacturing base to China.

This is also why it is so hard to find an alternative to the US dollar, because for a BRICS currency that functions more like Keynes’s bancor, the US and China - the world’s super net importer and the super net exporter - would both be finished. The whole point of a bancor is such that the world’s productive capacity is re-distributed more equally as opposed to the current system where only very few players benefit from it. China can avoid this punishment by transitioning its economy into a domestic consumption model, and becoming less dependent on export industries, but so far we’re not seeing a lot of movement in that direction yet.

Note: I didn’t watch the video, only based on the two slides posted here.

It's a real outsider's take. Their ideas really can simply be contradictory and shallow. They just have to convince an army of brainwormed Pillow salesmen to chip in 10k here and there by vaguely referencing something Ben Stein taught them in their High School economics class.