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Book Review:

WHEN CHINA RULES THE WORLD: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order By Martin Jacques

NY Times | Dec 31, 2009

Waking Dragon

By JOSEPH KAHN

Historians may someday debate whether the financial crisis that began a year ago is most notable for how much damage it did to the United States, or how little it inflicted on the world’s major rising power, China. Helped by huge state intervention and buoyant optimism almost surreally undiminished by the crisis of confidence across the Pacific, China has had a very good downturn. It is closing the gap with the world’s most developed economies faster than anticipated and could overtake Japan as the world’s second-largest economy when the final figures for last year are tallied.

China’s already rapid emergence is changing many things, from diplomatic alliances in Africa to the status of the dollar as the world’s favorite currency. It may also open minds to a provocative thesis that, until a short time ago, might have been dismissed as breathless hyperbole.

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New order: A stimulating yet ultimately flawed portrait of a China-dominated world

In “When China Rules the World,” Martin Jacques, a columnist for The Guardian of London and a visiting scholar at the London School of Economics, argues that China will not just displace the United States as the major superpower. It will also marginalize the West in history and upend our core notions of what it means to be modern.

This bold assertion, he acknowledges, rests on the assumption that nothing will derail the political stability and economic dynamism China enjoys today. It is not clear that even the most senior leaders in Beijing share Jacques’s faith in that forecast. But the future is unknowable, and his extrapolations are, if not provable, at least plausible. The strength of his book lies in his exhaustive, incisive exploration of possibilities that many people have barely begun to contemplate about a future dominated by China.

Much of the journalism and many of the best-selling books on China treat the country’s rise as an economic phenomenon. It is presented as a developing country, albeit the biggest one, that has opened its doors to the West, allowed a Western-style market economy to flourish and exported goods to wealthy consumers abroad. Those things are true. But Jacques argues that the focus on the economic side of the story has lulled the West into a false sense of security. “The mainstream Western attitude has held that, in its fundamentals, the world will be relatively little changed by China’s rise,” he writes. Rather, he says, “the rise of China will change the world in the most profound ways.”

Unlike Britain, the United States or Germany at various times during the past 200 years, China is not emerging on the world stage as a new, powerful nation-state. It is, instead, as one Chinese writer put it, regaining “lost international status,” becoming the first ancient civilization to re-emerge and reclaim its position as a dominant power.

China was the wealthiest, most unified and most technologically advanced civilization until well into the 18th century, Jacques points out. It lost that position some 200 years ago as the industrial revolution got under way in Europe. Scholars once viewed China as having crippling social, cultural and political defects that underscored the superiority of the West. But given the speed and strength of China’s recent growth, those defects have begun to look more like anomalies. It is the West’s run of dominance, not China’s period of malaise, that could end up being the fluke, Jacques writes.

Skyscrapers and stock markets in China look like those in the West, of course. But Jacques argues that the country’s cultural core resembles ancient China far more than it does modern Europe or the United States. It is accumulating wealth much faster than it is absorbing foreign ideas. The result, he says, is that China is nearly certain to become a major power in its own mold, not the “status quo” power accepting of Western norms and institutions that many policy makers in Washington hope and expect it will be.

Joseph Kahn is a former Beijing bureau chief and now a deputy foreign editor of The Times.

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Youtube | Nov 6, 2009

Posted by: SignificantImagery

The dollar will get “utterly destroyed” and become “virtually worthless”, said Damon Vickers, chief investment officer of Nine Points Capital Partners. Due to the huge wage disparities between the United States and emerging markets like China, Vickers said that may resolve itself in some type of a global currency crisis.

“If the global currency crisis unfolds, then inevitably you get an alignment of a global world government. A new global currency and a new world order, so we may be moving towards that,” he said.

For those who have claimed this is a fake clip I suggest you visit CNBC’s website:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/33709379

Note the inverted pyramid/illuminati triangle with the hypnotic spinning lights of Nine Points Capital Partners in the background. – PJ

The demise of the dollar

In a graphic illustration of the new world order, Arab states have launched secret moves with China, Russia and France to stop using the US currency for oil trading.

Independent | Oct 6, 2009

By Robert Fisk

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years.

The Americans, who are aware the meetings have taken place – although they have not discovered the details – are sure to fight this international cabal which will include hitherto loyal allies Japan and the Gulf Arabs. Against the background to these currency meetings, Sun Bigan, China’s former special envoy to the Middle East, has warned there is a risk of deepening divisions between China and the US over influence and oil in the Middle East. “Bilateral quarrels and clashes are unavoidable,” he told the Asia and Africa Review. “We cannot lower vigilance against hostility in the Middle East over energy interests and security.”

This sounds like a dangerous prediction of a future economic war between the US and China over Middle East oil – yet again turning the region’s conflicts into a battle for great power supremacy. China uses more oil incrementally than the US because its growth is less energy efficient. The transitional currency in the move away from dollars, according to Chinese banking sources, may well be gold. An indication of the huge amounts involved can be gained from the wealth of Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar who together hold an estimated $2.1 trillion in dollar reserves.

The decline of American economic power linked to the current global recession was implicitly acknowledged by the World Bank president Robert Zoellick. “One of the legacies of this crisis may be a recognition of changed economic power relations,” he said in Istanbul ahead of meetings this week of the IMF and World Bank. But it is China’s extraordinary new financial power – along with past anger among oil-producing and oil-consuming nations at America’s power to interfere in the international financial system – which has prompted the latest discussions involving the Gulf states.

Brazil has shown interest in collaborating in non-dollar oil payments, along with India. Indeed, China appears to be the most enthusiastic of all the financial powers involved, not least because of its enormous trade with the Middle East.

China imports 60 per cent of its oil, much of it from the Middle East and Russia. The Chinese have oil production concessions in Iraq – blocked by the US until this year – and since 2008 have held an $8bn agreement with Iran to develop refining capacity and gas resources. China has oil deals in Sudan (where it has substituted for US interests) and has been negotiating for oil concessions with Libya, where all such contracts are joint ventures.

Furthermore, Chinese exports to the region now account for no fewer than 10 per cent of the imports of every country in the Middle East, including a huge range of products from cars to weapon systems, food, clothes, even dolls. In a clear sign of China’s growing financial muscle, the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, yesterday pleaded with Beijing to let the yuan appreciate against a sliding dollar and, by extension, loosen China’s reliance on US monetary policy, to help rebalance the world economy and ease upward pressure on the euro.

Ever since the Bretton Woods agreements – the accords after the Second World War which bequeathed the architecture for the modern international financial system – America’s trading partners have been left to cope with the impact of Washington’s control and, in more recent years, the hegemony of the dollar as the dominant global reserve currency.

The Chinese believe, for example, that the Americans persuaded Britain to stay out of the euro in order to prevent an earlier move away from the dollar. But Chinese banking sources say their discussions have gone too far to be blocked now. “The Russians will eventually bring in the rouble to the basket of currencies,” a prominent Hong Kong broker told The Independent. “The Brits are stuck in the middle and will come into the euro. They have no choice because they won’t be able to use the US dollar.”

Chinese financial sources believe President Barack Obama is too busy fixing the US economy to concentrate on the extraordinary implications of the transition from the dollar in nine years’ time. The current deadline for the currency transition is 2018.

The US discussed the trend briefly at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh; the Chinese Central Bank governor and other officials have been worrying aloud about the dollar for years. Their problem is that much of their national wealth is tied up in dollar assets.

“These plans will change the face of international financial transactions,” one Chinese banker said. “America and Britain must be very worried. You will know how worried by the thunder of denials this news will generate.”

Iran announced late last month that its foreign currency reserves would henceforth be held in euros rather than dollars. Bankers remember, of course, what happened to the last Middle East oil producer to sell its oil in euros rather than dollars. A few months after Saddam Hussein trumpeted his decision, the Americans and British invaded Iraq.

Robert B. Zoellick sees dollar’s role diminishing

NY Times | Sep 29, 2009

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON — The president of the World Bank said on Monday that America’s days as an unchallenged economic superpower might be numbered and that the dollar was likely to lose its favored position as the euro and the Chinese renminbi assume bigger roles.

“The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar’s place as the world’s predominant reserve currency,” the World Bank president, Robert B. Zoellick, said in a speech at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. “Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the dollar.”

Mr. Zoellick, who previously served as the United States trade representative and as deputy secretary of state under President George W. Bush, said that the euro provided a “respectable alternative” for financing international transactions and that there was “every reason to believe that the euro’s acceptability could grow.”

In the next 10 to 20 years, he said, the dollar will face growing competition from China’s currency, the renminbi. Though Chinese leaders have minimized their currency’s use in international transactions, largely so they could keep greater control over exchange rates, Mr. Zoellick said the renminbi would “evolve into a force in financial markets.”

The World Bank, which is financed by governments around the globe and lends money primarily to poor countries, has no say over the economic policies of large nations or over currency matters.

But Mr. Zoellick’s comments were unusual, in part because he seemed intent on being provocative. He argued that the United States and a handful of other rich nations could no longer dominate the world economy and suggested that America was losing its clout. He also took issue with a central piece of the Obama administration’s proposal regarding the country’s financial regulatory system.

“The greenback’s fortunes will depend heavily on U.S. choices,” Mr. Zoellick said. “Will the United States resolve its debt problems without a resort to inflation? Can America establish long-term discipline over spending and its budget deficit?”

Mr. Zoellick criticized President Obama’s plan to put the Federal Reserve in charge of reducing “systemic risk” and to regulate institutions considered too big to fail. Saying that Congress had become uneasy about the Fed’s exercise of emergency powers to bail out financial institutions and prop up credit markets, Mr. Zoellick argued that the Treasury rather than the Fed should get more power because the Treasury was more accountable to Congress.

“In the United States, it will be difficult to vest the independent and powerful technocrats at the Federal Reserve with more authority,” Mr. Zoellick said, adding that “the Treasury is an executive department, and therefore Congress and the public can more directly oversee how it uses any added authority.”

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva speaks during the 64th United Nations General Assembly September 23, 2009 at UN headquarters in New York. Getty Images.

“We are obliged to intervene across national borders and must therefore re-found the world economic order,” he said

Press TV | Sep 23, 2009

The Brazilian president calls for a new world order in global economy, which gives developing countries more control over the World Bank and the IMF.

Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, insisted that every country should play its role in overhauling the interdependent global economy.

“Because the global economy is interdependent, we are obliged to intervene across national borders and must therefore re-found the world economic order,” he said, according to AFP.

Lula further underlined that the world leaders should go ahead with regulating the financial markets and putting an end to protectionism.

He called for international financial entities such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to be “more representative and democratic” and to give poor and developing countries a due share if they want to overhaul the global financial system.

“Poor and developing countries must increase their share of control in the IMF and the World Bank,” he said.

Lula is going to represent his country as an emerging economy at the G20 summit later week in Pittsburg with US President Barack Obama hosting the event.

Wall Street Journal | Sep 18, 2009

LONDON (Dow Jones)–Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has said agreement is needed on several global reserve currencies, and said such a move wouldn’t damage the U.S., RIA Novosti reports Friday.

Speaking at an investment forum in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, Putin said the imbalance of money supply in the U.S. compared with the rest of the world was one reason for the current financial crisis, Novosti reports.

“There is only one solution, a long-term agreement on common rules of conduct or on several global reserve currencies,” Putin said. “To my mind this poses no threat to the U.S. economy, which would only benefit from it in the future.”

Earlier this week an aide to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said talk of replacing the dollar as international reserve currency was “irrational,” but said a

Several currencies, including the Chinese yuan, the British pound, the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc should be used to diversify the global currency system.

Raw Story | Sep 8, 2009

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said in a report published Monday that the U.S. dollar should be replaced as the world’s standard reserve currency, giving rise to a new global currency managed by an as-yet undetermined financial regulatory organization.

Heiner Flassbeck, director of the conference, told Bloomberg News that changes needed in the world’s financial systems rival the scope of the Bretton Woods or European Monetary System agreements.

The Bretton Woods agreement established in 1944 the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, following allied victory in World War II.

“[The] dominance of the dollar as the main means of international payments [has] played an important role in the build-up of the global imbalances in the run-up to the financial crisis,” the report says. “Another disadvantage of the current international reserve system is that it imposes a greater adjustment burden on deficit countries (except if it is a country issuing a reserve currency) than on surplus countries.”

The UN adds: “Such a multilateral system would tackle the problem of destabilizing capital flows at its source. It would remove a major incentive for speculation and ensure that monetary factors do not stand in the way of achieving a level playing field for international trade. It would also get rid of debt traps and counterproductive conditionality. The last point is perhaps the most important one: countries facing strong depreciation pressure would automatically receive the required assistance once a sustainable level of the exchange rate had been reached in the form of swap agreements or direct intervention by the counterparty.”

The move should not be surprising to observers of global economics, as a U.N. panel of currency experts came to the same conclusion in March, according to Reuters.

The conference specifically emphasizes the enhancement of the International Monetary Fund’s “special drawing right” (SDR), which may serve as the “supranational” currency.

World-wide shake-up
The past year has seen a dramatic shake-up in oversight and management of the U.S. and global economies.

For months, Russia and China have been calling for a new world reserve currency.

Russia, for its part, supports replacing the dollar on the world stage, suggesting the Chinese yuan may be the quickest path to diversified reserves.

“There is a need to make the IMF a true representative of the world’s leading economies. It’s not there right now,” said Russian finance minister Alexei Kudrin in June, noting that China had a lower representation quota than Switzerland or Belgium.

Kudrin also said he did not expect to see any new monetary unions rise, although the Gulf states agreed in May to use Saudi Arabia as a base for a pending “monetary union” and new central banking authority.

The issue of IMF reform should therefore be raised “in earnest, in a bold way,” Kudrin said, adding countries should be “represented in proportion to the strength of these economies and their role in the world economy.”

Over the weekend, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner argued successfully to strengthen the “Basel II” framework for international commerce, which would see all G20 member nations increase their currency liquidity and allow centralized, “global supervision” of financial industries. The Obama administration is committed to full compliance with the framework by 2011.

The Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank governors plan to meet in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Sept. 24 and 25. Several major liberal groups are planning demonstrations, including the A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition. The city has already secured a deal to use National Guard troops provide a security buffer for the world’s financial elite during their meeting.

Also on Sunday, a key Chinese official predicted that the dollar’s increasing supply, which grows with added liquidity, meant the currency could “fall hard” within “a year or two.” The official also signaled that China is moving its reserves away from the dollar and toward gold, euros and yen.

Washington has staunchly defended the dollar as the world’s reserve, with President Obama, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner all insisting there is no need for a new global reserve currency.

The UN report which makes the recommendations is available online (PDF link).

Medvedev sees single currency dream in G8 coin gift. AFP

AFP | Jul 11, 2009

L’AQUILA, Italy (AFP) — Even if Russia’s call for a global currency failed to gain much traction at a G8 summit, President Dmitry Medvedev took home a coin meant to symbolize that the dream may one day come true.

The Russian leader proudly displayed the coin, which bears the English words “United Future World Currency”, to journalists after the summit wrapped up in the quake-hit Italian town of L’Aquila.

Medvedev said that although the coin, which resembled a euro and featured the image of five leaves, was just a gift given to leaders it showed that people were beginning to think seriously about a new global currency.

http://www.futureworldcurrency.com/

“In all likelihood something similar could appear and it could be held in your hand and used as a means of payment,” he told reporters. “This is the international currency.”

Russia, along with China, has been a vocal proponent of diversifying the global currency system away from the dollar, which has dominated global finance and commerce since the end of World War II.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy at the summit joined the band in favour of dumping the dollar as the international currency of reference, insisting that “we cannot stick with just one single currency.”

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pulls new world currency from his pocket

Medvedev given first coin of future supranational currency at G8

“Mr. Dodd, all of us here at the policy making level of the foundation have at one time or another served in the OSS or the European Economic Administration, operating under directives from the White House. We operate under those same directives…The substance of the directives under which we operate is that we shall use our grant making power to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.”

-Rowan Gaither, the President of the Ford Foundation during a meeting with Norman Dodd, Research Director for the Reece Committee, 1953.

Moscow Times | Jul 14, 2009

By Alexandra Odynova

President Dmitry Medvedev showing reporters a sample gold coin of a possible global currency at the G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, on Friday. Mikhail Klimentyev / RIA-Novosti / AP

After months of pushing for a new world currency, President Dmitry Medvedev had more than an idea to tout at his G8 news conference. He had the real thing.

With a broad grin, Medvedev held aloft a shiny gold coin Friday that he said represented a “symbol of unity” and a possible “future world currency.”

“I have some supranational currency in my pocket that I got as a souvenir. This is a test sample of a currency unit under the Unity in Diversity motto,” Medvedev said, holding the coin between two fingers.

“It is called the United Future World Currency. It can already be seen and touched,” he said, according to a transcript posted on the Kremlin’s web site.

Examples of the coin, worth $3,900 and produced by the United Future World Currency, a group backing the idea of a global currency, was presented to all world leaders attending the Group of Eight summit in L’Aquila, Italy.

http://www.futureworldcurrency.com/

The coin was made by Belgian Luc Luycx, who also designed one side of the Euro coins, and are called “eurodollars” in a symbolic call for a common currency to unite Europe and the United States.

Medvedev pulled out his coin when reporters asked him about new reserve currencies at the news conference that closed the three-day summit. “This is a symbol of our unity and our desire to solve such issues,” Medvedev said.

Russia and China have called for a “super currency” to replace the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy said at the summit that the dollar’s supremacy as a reserve currency is outdated.

“This has become a regular theme now,” Medvedev said Friday. “We are discussing the creation or, to be more correct, the appearance of new reserve currencies, including the possibility of making the Russian ruble such a currency unit.”

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Russian President Dmitry Medvedev pulls new world currency from his pocket

Medvedev given first coin of future supranational currency at G8

Coin News | Jul 12th, 2009

The sample of the first “test” currency from the international project for a new virtual global currency, given the draft name, “United Future World Currency – Eurodollar,” was presented as the exclusive gift to Heads of State and Government at the G8 Summit: Barack H. Obama, Dmitij Anatolyevich Medvedev, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, Silvio Berlusconi, Taro Aso, Stephen Harper, Josè Mauel Barroso, Fredrik Reinfeldt.

The final name and symbol for the new currency will be decided in a competition for children in 1000 schools throughout the world, organised by the Museo del Tempo.

The initiative began in Italy and enjoys the patronage of the Italian Prime Minister’s Office and the Italian Treasury. Although the initial aim is to unite the United States of America with the United States of Europe, it will also be open to other Countries.

The example of the Euro, which united Countries with different histories and cultures under the same currency, is a concrete precedent that demonstrates how this project can indeed come to life and gather together nations from several different continents.

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