We give money to Israel, Ukraine, and everyone else - we print and print and print and a few people close to the action take some off the top.
That’s it. Maybe some rich kids get their university debt wiped clean (not community college though).
The US and even local governments within have become corrupted to the core - they are like ATMs and havens of various types for the emerging international wealth class.
That class may very well want to promote your idea since the best seat at the table right now is China.
Now everyone wants to be owed by the US à la China, it’s been great for international business. Mexico is the heir to that throne more than Europe - which doesn’t produce anything the world wants.
You might also stop buying real estate if the government seems unstable and economy is poised to collapse. Good soybeans also depend on fuel prices and the continued flow of fertilizer...
https://watcher.guru/news/20-billion-oil-deals-paid-in-chine...
"China and Saudi Arabia Settle First Oil Trade Using Digital Yuan"
https://www.economywatch.com/china-and-saudi-arabia-settle-f...
"China, the world’s largest coal consumer, has domestic reserves of coal to last the next 50 years, according to annual reserves data from the Ministry of Natural Resources cited by Bloomberg.
At current rates of domestic production, China also has crude oil reserves that could last for at least 18 more years, according to the ministry"
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/China-Say...
https://www.mining.com/web/china-has-enough-coal-reserves-to...
What’s happening to US bonds has been compared to using a credit card to pay off your mortgage...
The US prints two kinds of dollars, the regular kind, then the T-bills.
T-bills get exchanged like dollars, investors/governments buy them because they are thought to be as stable as dollars, but also bear a bit of yield. The US benefits by printing T-bills over dollars because merely by changing the current interest rate, they change the dollar supply. Increasing interest rates lower the value of T-bills, decreasing the supply of dollars (as Silicon Valkey Bank found out...). This allows the US currency to remain very stable.
Referring to the $40T of T-bills merely as "debt" is quite deceptive. It's the global currency. You need enough currency out there to represent the actual amount of wealth, otherwise the values of dollars increases, and deflation is the only thing worse than inflation.
The US' $2T budget deficit is basically the rest of the world paying the US for the privilege of using US currency. The US is printing money, and getting the benefits of spending, because the rest of the world needs dollars to transact. They send us goods, we send them printed dollars. And then we get a president who calls this situation bad, because he doesn't understand what a "trade deficit" is. Utter insanity to have such a position and then just throw it all away.
Why? Dollars are currently the most convenient. If that changes the world could easily switch to Euros, Yen, Yuan, etc.
Plus if everyone doesn't choose the same it's less convenient.
As to shifting politics: The EU is famously extremely hard to move.
The European Council decides the political direction and consists of the heads of state of the member countries; the European Commission is the executive cabinet and needs buy-in from the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament; the Council of the European Union is made up from ministers of the member states and each member state has a veto right on all foreign policy proposed by the European Commission; the European Parliament's members are directly elected through independent elections in the individual member states with proportional representation, and any policy proposed by the European Commission also needs a majority here; the Court of Justice of the European Union's General Court oversees this and is composed of two judges appointed by each member state for a renewable six-year period and reviewed by an independent committee.
In other words: nothing gets done fast, and nothing gets done without buy-in from a lot of people with very opposed political goals. Quite different from a country like, say, the United States, where the loser of the popular vote routinely becomes president, is handed God-Emperor levels of power, and is virtually impossible to unseat - leaving the foreign policies of a nuclear superpower to be decided by how a single person felt when he stepped out of his bed this morning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triffin_dilemma
This 2020 piece by Lyn Alden is a great explainer:
https://www.lynalden.com/fraying-petrodollar-system/
(Not that I think anything Trump has done has helped the situation even accidentally.)
Sure, there was a serious conversation to be had about this at some point, but it was probably before stacking up tons of unsustainable debt that directly depends on that part of the shell game. And there are many things that can/should change, but in a certain way and at a certain time to avoid pain and chaos. Arguing "this was always bad for us, fuck it" is kind of a pattern now, right? When someone wants to change some things, great, everything sucks. But when someone wants to tear down every status quo, and especially the ones that they apparently benefited from while saying "everyone after me doesn't need it", then it's a pretty clear sign.
US is now a lot of crazy old people finding new ways to eat their children and trying to see the world burn before they check out. They created the bulk of the debt, benefited from it immensely, propped it up with collateral that was always kind of imaginary, continue to increase the debt. Not great, but now we are also proposing to just destroy what's left of that thin collateral? I don't know how to explain that with greed or stupidity even, it just seems like spite.
And is your proposal to just hope to be one of the next generation who still can eat their children? Or better yet, the children of those who didn't make it before the ladder was pulled up?
The middle class actually benefits the most from this situation! More goods, more government services, etc. How much more? Just add up all the trade deficits, that's all benefit accrued almost entirely to the middle class.
What I meant was "blue collar working class" as opposed to the neo-artistocrat professional class. The Triffin Dilemma is a contributor to the K shaped economy and rise of populism.
>And from there, the value of the system depends on who you ask. Folks who are often on the higher end of the income spectrum who worked in finance, government, healthcare, or technology benefitted from this system, since they obtained many of the benefits of globalization and none of the drawbacks. Folks who are often on the lower end of the income spectrum, specifically those that make physical things, are the ones that benefitted least and gave the most up, since their jobs were outsourced and automated at a faster rate than other developed countries. But now with China also undermining the structure of the system, even the geopolitical/hegemonic benefits for the political class are subverted as well.
The piece puts increasing trade deficits next to lots of stuff about increasing inequality, but it does not make the case that trade deficits are the cause of increasing inequality.
There's a person that had a job making physical things, but they are not inherently a "person that only makes physical things." The idea that bringing back the making of physical things will make these people wealthier is, well, suspicious. Unions? Better taxations systems? Modernizing manufacturing so that each worker is far more productive and we can compete with the world? That may help. But reducing trade deficits will not fix any of the K shaped economy.
We can pay for imports with things we make or things we own. To a first approximation, making things employs people and owning things does not. If we pay with things we make, our economy employs people. If we pay with things we own, the jobs disappear while stocks/bonds/real estate soar.
If you want the whole story from an actual economist, read "Trade Wars are Class Wars" by Klein and Pettis.
How does this not correspond directly to reduced trade deficits? In this scenario the US is either sourcing more of what it needs internally, and thereby importing less, or it is more competitive globally and therefore exporting more, or both.
But manufacturing is not a way to decrease inequality unless there's massive massive other sorts of changes going with it.
In fact destroying the higher paying jobs to replace them with lower paying jobs in the US will heighten the inequality. And that's what's happening right now.
In any empirical sense this is absolutely false. The only instance of a significant negative instance of deflation was its contribution to the Great Depression in the early nineteen hundreds, and the effect of that was minor compared to the effects of extreme inflation (hyperinflation) that occurred in places like Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe. Deflation is inherently self-limiting because people have a baseline of goods they must consume for survival (housing, food etc.), and once that baseline is reached spending does not fall further; there's not a single instance in history of 99% deflation, while 99%, 999% and even 999999999% inflation has happened within even just the past few decades.
Oh boy, do I have news for you. It is in fact possible to run out of money, and in a deflating economy with no jobs you can't just go out and earn more. It puts peoples' collective backs against the wall -- at which point they decide to fight like cornered animals rather than die in a corner, and things get nasty.
Inflation crises are awful, but when you run out of money there are jobs and you can get more and this generally prevents them from turning into bloodbaths. This is why we collectively decided to err in this direction.
Weimar Germany is the perfect example. Did it suck? Yeah. Savings were incinerated, everyday activities became market speculation, the memes are all true -- but it happened under nearly full employment and once the root causes were addressed everything largely simmered down. This is in stark contrast to the deflationary shock of the Great Depression later that decade which propelled the Nazis into power and led directly to WWII.
99% deflation doesn't happen because people start killing each other long before then.
Month Book value ($M) Tonnes
July 2006 8,967 6,606
July 2011 8,412 6,197
July 2016 7,883 5,807
July 2021 7,794 5,742
July 2026 7,812 5,755
Your figures do point out that the Netherlands's amount of gold is small, but it is not level headed to think that they are somehow alone or unrepresentative of far more countries with far more gold.
Gold prices have exploded between these two dates. Am I missing something?
This is similar to what the French did last year.
The other thing I noticed, is that as the article chose to mention:
> Gold that is held with the Bank of England must meet modern international trade standards
with implication being that the gold it previously held in the USA was not meeting those standards, but is that just journalistic fluff? what are those standards? (could be exact weights in g rather than purity?)
NB the Netherlands still has >200 tonnes of gold held in the USA & Canada.
[1] https://www.bficapital.com/blog/what-is-inside-fort-knox
When you buy gold, you purchase based on the amount of gold, not the total amount of alloy. This is true in both markets. This difference in standard is practically not a big deal because you very rarely physically move the gold, as moving gold requires a lot of security and is a risk.
and has a cost
https://vinodvsharma.com/top-15-biggest-gold-refineries-in-t...
Physical gold bars are transferred via plane between London and New York every day. The gold flies in the cargo holds of regularly scheduled commercial passenger flights. The quantity transferred depends on demand, and could be several metric tons daily.
This is nothing unusual. Dubai is another major gold transfer hub, and it operates via the same mechanism.
Regarding the article highlighting differing international standards for gold, London uses standard 400-ounce bars, while the US uses 100-ounce or 1kg bars. Often, the bars need to be remelted (elsewhere, typically in Switzerland) before they can be added to the vaults.
Again, nothing unusual.
Many people buy (normally small) gold bars only to discover that they can't sell them back by the same price.
The difference between London and the US is that the bars are of different size (12.5 vs 1kg).
Physical versus contract differences are real and require moving the actual gold. What most users do is sell deliverable where they want it out and then buy contracts or deliverable where they want it and then let the market figure out how to move gold around to settle. (It probably won’t involve moving gold from where you had it to where you want it unless you’re in a cohort.)
That 59T could have been someone that decided to starting owning gold for the very first time, so 'net-new' holding rather than a 'transfer'. The 59T could have also been multiple parties and not an individual "somebody": we only know that it was 59T from the sell side (NL).
I know the above was in the article, but please never mention the US and Canada in the same breath. Please.
That & symbol just irritates.
From a Canadian's perspective, it's like mentioning a sophisticated, decent human being, and a slimy smarmy used car salesman, in the same breath.
Please.
What if you annexed us? We have beaches and it’d more than double your economy.
Oh hey that’s not fair, we have equal amounts of beaches, the water is just a different color. You are going down with us..
Now both of you go stand in a corner until you are ready to work together to take down the government that has us all acting this way.
Why are European countries moving their gold out of North America?
As for why, the American people elected Donald Trump for a second time and the recent trade wars have helped spread the notion that maybe the USA cannot be trusted by its supposed allies as much as it once could be.
New York: 31.33% -> 18.52%
Ottawa: 19.72% -> 18.52%
My guess is the original title focused just on the U.S., but the editors didn't want to draw attention from the big cheeto, so the headline was changed and now it looks less like the U.S. is the primary target.
Honestly, if quick access to their holdings is a concern, I wouldn't hold it against the Dutch if they moved more gold out of Canada too. Unfortunately, you presently just don't know when a sovereign nation in the Americas might be embargoed by the U.S..
You can't quickly trade with the gold that's in their own safe storage facility in Zeist, because you would need to physically transport it. The reserve at the Bank of England is put there because there is a large market for gold trading there. So you can use the gold immediately to influence the markets.
Putting it in a safe place in another European country wouldn't have added value over storage in Zeist.
More specifically: very few people besides the NL government have any gold stored inside that facility, so intra-facility trade is basically nonexistent.
Because instead of treating each item as an individual thing, they were pooling everything with other items of the same type. So if I send in a brick and say it’s an iPhone 17 and you order an iPhone 17, you might get my brick.
Its audits only look at a tiny percentage of the holdings at a time, any kind of weighing or purity inspection is the exception rather than the rule, and third-party auditors or observers are not welcome. They basically look at a handful of bars, see that the seals on the other vaults are intact, and extrapolate that all the gold is perfectly fine.
In other words: the US could be pulling the fraud of the century here, and we'd never find out. But a full audit would be extremely expensive, there's no sign that there's any kind of foul play, and other countries are doing more-or-less the same.
And even if a country does notice that something is off with their US holdings, there's plenty of reason to keep it quiet and just play along.
I've no idea what checks are done to exclude such artifacts from gold storage. If somebody accepted them and stacked them in a reserve vault, they might go decades without discovery.
I guess it's not something to worry about. It's improbable, and even so, if everybody agrees on the value of undetected bogus W/Au ingots, makes no difference from the real thing.
It's also easier to sell in certain markets, such as London.
In the olden days, the local lords would marry their children together, to create familial groups and ensure that for the forseeable future the local areas would not have a conflict. Modern democracies don't have such valuable family members, we use valuable objects instead.
I wouldn't call that almost half, it used to be about half before the move (NY at 31.3, 19.7 in Canada).
Anyway, Frankfurt is the next biggest financial center after London, and it tend to get the business when a firm wants to move out of London .
Also from where did you hear that Frankfurt gets the business that's leaving London? What is your source? That was the hope for the Germans with the Brexit, but it never happened. German laws and bureaucracy is still far too hostile and outdated compared to London.
A problem that will solve itself within the next few years
Some even with an American accent which they picked up by watching YouTube videos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euronext_Dublin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Stock_Exchange
That said, I'm not entirely clear how the exchange's market cap should or shouldn't be thought of in terms of the total market cap of assets that the exchange lets you trade. Or indeed the float of those assets, which is a concept I've only learned about due to SpaceX's nonsense IPO, so take my thoughts with an appropriate pinch of salt.
Uh? By what metric?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Financial_Centres_Index
(And yes, saying "America" for "US of A" annoys me too. First step towards losing an imperialist state of mind is letting people from Canada and Brazil be in America).
Nobody shakes their metaphorical fist at the Central African Republic for daring to use Central African as its demonym. It's simply understood that the surrounding countries are also African, yet simply do not have the name of the continent in its name.
But if you do want to be pedantic, England is not technically a country anymore, it's the United Kingdom.
That is not the reason.
People say that Columbus discovered America. They don't mean the country, they mean the continent. The people in the continent of America are called Americans. About a century ago, US Americans came to view America as two continents.
Many countries still hold to America being a single continent, but there's no name for the people of America because US Americans stole it. The is very equivalent to how the EU is stealing Europe/European.
Ugh, your concept of EU is closer to the USSR or maybe current Russia than to the actual EU. I sincerely hope that such nightmarish concept will never prevail over the relative sanity that we have now.
But only the most imbecille people have fallen for that. Nobody with any kind of sense or basic knowledge considers EU to be Europe or vice versa.
> Britain has always been an outlier due to being an island hanging off the edge, and is now a pariah and traitor state which will also be defined by abandonment and disloyalty to the EU project of total integration.
Just like they were last time, but they won that war in the end.
When South Americans refer to Americans as "estadounidense" is that imperialist Mexico erasure? The USA is not the only "United States" in North America.
See? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49575360
Were not Americans, we are United Statesians!
"The Soviet Union" wasn't really a name either, as "soviet" just means a governing council. But since it's a foreign word it sounds like a name.
It's interesting that some of the historically most powerful entities don't have proper names.
As for England being European, is it really? Traditionally people don't always count the Nordic countries as Europe, and I'd assume the same would be true of England? Culturally it is of course, just as much as France or Germany.
Hmm, maybe I should be pro-imperialism. I’ll do that before calling a Brazilian, Canadian, or Mexican an American to satisfy the whims of the language police.
But if you want to go to uni and call Americans United Statesians and fight a made up culture war, you’re certainly free to do that (in America at least, wherever that is).
I'm being highly pedantic here.
Which we all know, is the best kind of correct.
A) "I stayed in England"
B) "I travelled around Britain"
C) "I went to Europe"
we use "going to Europe" and "going to the continent" fully aware that the UK is in Europe
So, they may live in Cupertino, Palo Alto, or Oakland, but when they say “we’re going to The City for a concert on Saturday!” we can hear them pronounce those capital letters as an unambiguous reference to the one, true City.
Eh, they also say “I’m going to SF”
But agreed definitely not “Frisco”
see:
>“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace,” he wrote, adding that the US needed “complete and total control” of Greenland.
not quite sure what's up with this timeline.
If there is dodgy stuff happening in the US it makes sense to keep the grift going as long as possible
They can't say that, it just gets them into a pissing match with Trump and what good is that but it's not hard to read between the lines.
I also do wonder if the Netherlands knows anything more about CozyBear/FancyBear and the 2016 election than they've let on. ( https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/rare-insight-cyber-espiona... )
A standard 24,000-TEU cargo ship could hold every ounce of humanity's gold using under 1.5% of its physical volume.
So the Dutch portion is a rounding error of global gold that fits in a single shipping container.
[1, paid source] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/mehr-wirtschaft/marce...
[2, last section is relevant] https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/ausland/usa/id_101419346...
Share of gold before relocation:
New York: 31.33%
Zeist: 30.83%
Ottawa: 19.72%
London: 18.12%
Share of gold after relocation
New York: 18.52%
Zeist: 30.83%
Ottawa: 18.52%
London: 32.13%
And if you read the whole article, you'll see that all of the anti-Trump framing comes from "experts", not from the actual people moving the gold.
If you'd like to read the actual statement from the Dutch National Bank, it's here:
https://www.dnb.nl/en/general-news/press-release-2026/dnb-im...
De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) has improved the tradability of its gold reserves by transferring part of the gold holdings from New York and Ottawa to London. This ensures that DNB is better prepared for severe crises.
In view of increasing geopolitical unrest, DNB is strengthening…
> Experts say that rhetoric appears inherently related to the abrasiveness of the Trump administration towards traditional allies.
Also, the “experts” are just right here. Are you gonna say that Trump hasn’t been throwing our allies under the bus?
If the point is to get your gold away from the US and its president, why leave ~19% of if there? Why take gold out of Canada? Why is a two-word phrase inherently related to the abrasiveness of the Trump administration towards traditional allies"?
And the bank's stated reason is: "Gold that is held with the Bank of England must meet modern international trade standards and is regarded as the world's most easily tradable gold and will therefore be the most readily available for DNB in a crisis situation. The gold reserves held in New York and Ottawa cannot be utilised as quickly and directly in such a situation." Why is that not the more plausible one, and the basis for the headline?
Well, they're not putting it there, either.
> In view of increasing geopolitical unrest, DNB is strengthening its crisis preparedness. Improving the liquidity and tradability of the Dutch gold reserves is part of these preparations. Moreover, a more balanced distribution of these reserves between North America, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands helps to spread risks and will make them more readily available for use in a crisis situation.
The goal is to make these reserves more liquid in the event of a geopolitical crisis. It’s easy to say that Trump was a factor in this decision given that he has been the cause of one geopolitical crisis after another. That hypothetical crisis doesn’t have to directly involve the Netherlands for this to make sense. For example, the price of oil shot way up because Trump decided to poke Iran and having more liquid reserves could make responding to that easier.
I don't disagree with that. (I mentioned Iran, a crisis that was precipitated by the current administration.)
I disagree with "Experts say that rhetoric appears inherently related to the abrasiveness of the Trump administration towards traditional allies" and "Having those reserves in the United States is a potential vulnerability...You can absolutely imagine a scenario where, for whatever reason, the Trump administration decides to hold onto them" etc.
> If the point is to get your gold away from the US and its president, why leave ~19% of if there?
Not all of the risk is "the USA may literally steal it", some of the risk is "UK may elect Farage who could be just as bad", and there's a non-zero chance that Trump is kicked out come November.
With a diversified portfolio, economic planning can be done in terms of probabilities; this is different from e.g. military planning, because the "portfolio" your military defends is "your nation" and this is somewhat more binary in success-vs.-fail.
> Why take gold out of Canada?
Because Canada is one of the places Trump is directly threatening.
There is a persistent rumour that there is a physical link between jpmorgan and comex. My understanding is that there is no real way to audit whats in there (unlike the BoE where they have tour guides that show you the gold)
Do Europeans have options to hold Bitcoin in ETFs, ETPs etc that are not storing the coins in the USA?
yes, but why would you want to? The only thing you would gain is instant trade settling (assuming the exchange is open)
I know it sounds like europe is a financial backwater, but we have all the things the US has, apart from the capitalisation.
I couldn't invest it in Bitcoin directly. It had to be on a special blocked account at a broker to ensure I couldn't touch it till my 73rd birthday.
There are a lot of Dutch people living in Canada.[4]
_____2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Salute>
Most countries held gold reserves as their currencies were backed by it. When money needed to move because of trade, the ratios of currencies backed by gold would shift as money got converted to other currencies. However, constantly moving physical gold back and forth with the ebs and flows of trade was impractical, so ownership of gold in central bank vaults usually just had its legal ownership marked on ledgers. Physical gold moving was more part of reconciliation. This description is an oversimplification as in practice, countries didn't always play by the rules of the gold standard (revaluations, going on and off the standard, etc), but you get the general idea.
This mostly ended as Bretton woods came into effect and the new system was basing the US dollars on gold, then other countries held direct US dollars and traded that instead. Countries could then convert those US dollars into gold. This ended when Nixon closed the gold window when he refused to raise interest rates as there started to be a run on gold as countries rushed to convert. The backdrop was that high spending on the Vietnam was and new social programs was driving inflation, but Nixon knew that would cause an economic slowdown he wasn't willing to do. Jimmy Carter then took a lot of the political flack for allowing the central bank to raise rates to kill it. This is why central bank independence is so important.
During times of geopolitical risk, countries would physically move their gold to be held in trust in friendly and/or rule of law countries. The USA was seen as this between ~1914-now.
Don't forget that the European continent has had wars almost non-stop for centuries. It is a good strategy to place your gold in a location that has not seen much action in the past 250 years.
Random Educated Guess; Probably part of some show of mutual trust to cement a treaty or other agreement, made way back when allied governments could mostly trust one another to hold to such agreements somewhat reliably?
Your implication here is something akin to the Netherlands thinks the US will invade Canada - remember the Dutch moved gold from there too, or that the US will decide to seize the Netherland’s gold (again, not that much money, huge irreparable harm to the US financial system, even Europe hasn’t confiscated Russian assets) but if the US felt compelled to seize Dutch assets what makes you think such a dramatic scenario wouldn’t result in the US compelling the UK to also seize those assets?
The US can demand that we seize other people's gold, but if we acceded then it's game over for our financial industry - London is an important financial centre today but if it's actually just New York but on the far side of the Atlantic who cares?
My guess is that the UK would say "No" and since that's presumably a demand from the Orange Buffoon not somebody sane the next thing would be an order to attack us militarily, which is strikingly dumb in this circumstance. Of course the US can destroy Britain though it might not be as easy in practice as it looks on paper - but the bloodshed would be horrific and all the victims speak English and have Internet access.
Bombing a girl's school in Iran looks like a PR master stroke by comparison.
Iran killed more than 30,000 of its own people for peacefully protesting and continues to hang its own citizens to this day. They (along with Hamas, Hezbollah, and more) intentionally set up military assets next to civilian facilities because they know we don’t intentionally strike civilian facilities and they tell you that themselves. Iran intentionally attacks civilians and civilian infrastructure and provides military support to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They should be attacked for providing support for Russia alone, let alone anything else they’ve been doing.
Anyway back on topic
> The US can demand that we seize other people's gold, but if we acceded then it's game over for our financial industry - London is an important financial centre today but if it's actually just New York but on the far side of the Atlantic who cares?
The kind of scenarios envisioned in which the US seizes gold from the Netherlands are so catastrophic and crazy that requiring the UK to also seize said gold would seem to be not that big of a deal.
You guys are driving yourself into psychosis about how the world works and creating nonsense scenarios like the US is somehow going to just seize a pathetic $80 billion in gold and completely ruin the credibility of its financial system when Europe won’t even seize Russian assets and it’s practically at war. This shows the kind of bar needed to seize sovereign wealth. And no, Trump can’t and isn’t dumb enough to start seizing assets of another country. If you think he can and he is, you’re wrong and it is further evidence that you’re just whipping yourself up into crazy land.
But that does not mean that launching an assault on Iran at Netanyahu's bidding was a smart move. Especially if it turned out that US arsenals were half empty. This is what you get when no one can tell "no" to the President and survive in their function.
It is not clear to me yet how this entire Iran thing is going to finish. Now the bet seems to be on strangling their economy, which may not even work, but will probably cause some serious suffering of the same people who already suffer under a gallows-happy totalitarian government.
We didn’t launch a war based on Netanyahu’s bidding. This is a nonsensical mischaracterization of the war and belittles the general strategic situation.
> And no, Trump can’t and isn’t dumb enough to start seizing assets of another country.
I mean Maduro would like a word.
He literally kidnapped a world leader to gain access to a country's oil system.
Then there is the agitation, visits and posturing to invade an ally's fucking land. Its not that difficult to imagine trump confiscating "foreign gold" to even up the "trade deficit". There are no effective controls on trump's actions.
> completely ruin the credibility of its financial system
Besent is doing a good job ruining that trying to shout at the bond market, and pissing about with the Yen.
Then there is the attempts to yeet parts of the Fed it's self.
Sure, but it’s brought up as though the US is going around arbitrarily bombing children and schools and it’s simply false. In wars, mistakes happen. In the case of the US it was a mistake and we owned up to it on someways (we should do more, IMO) but Iran is doing much worse and we should focus on that primarily. I didn’t bring Iran up here, someone else did, so I can only respond to their characterizations by informing them how they are incorrect.
> I mean Maduro would like a word. He literally kidnapped a world leader to gain access to a country's oil system.
He’s a criminal destroyed the Venezuelan economy, and the results of his and Hugo Chavez’s policies resulted in an exodus of around 1/3rd of the Venezuelan population. Our actions were good there and will be good in the long term. Plus he was helping Russia evade American and European sanctions. That alone is good enough justification to arrest him.
> Then there is the agitation, visits and posturing to invade an ally's fucking land. Its not that difficult to imagine trump confiscating "foreign gold" to even up the "trade deficit". There are no effective controls on trump's actions.
We would lose far more than a whatever the Dutch gold is worth and it’s also an insignificant amount of money so there’s no reason for that to happen. You’re whipping yourself up into psychosis around Donald Trump which is clouding your judgment.
> Besent is doing a good job ruining that trying to shout at the bond market, and pissing about with the Yen.
Read more about European bonds then. If this is your criticism it applies more to France, UK, &c.
Then later the Dutch moved a lot more of their gold over there before/during WWII in order to keep it out of reach of the Nazis.
"We're Past The Point Of No Return" | Luke Gromen and Lyn Alden
Yes, and? A while ago the UK government refinanced bonds from WW1, the South Sea Bubble, Napoleonic and Crimean wars:
* https://www.theguardian.com/business/blog/2014/oct/31/paying...
Has the UK really experienced any issues related to not ever paying back its debt? (IMHO, most of the UK's problems can probably be sourced back to Thatcherism and more recently Brexit.)
The only way for a country to repay its debt, versus refinancing it, is to run budget surpluses, which can work if done in a certain way, but most countries avoid for often good reasons:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austerity:_The_History_of_a_Da...
After reading her book, I can't take Lyn seriously.
Arguably, though, the US has been "stealing" (in the form of sanctions and frozen assets) from other countries going back more than a few decades, at least as far as Iran in 1979, so your timeline doesn't hold up.
"Stealing" is wordplay when it comes to Russia because they are at war and the things that are "stolen" are assets being frozen to help pay restitution for the war they started. And Russia would deny the oil stolen from their ships was theirs because the entire point of the "shadow fleet" is to obfuscate ownership, mix and match the fluid products, to create plausible deniability to avoid sanctions.