Category Archives: Global Currency

George Soros Moves to Institute a New Global Currency

biggovernment.com | Apr 23, 2011

by  Arlen Williams

The INET Bretton Woods summit, summoned by George Soros and those who alternatively hide behind, or gather around him, has now happened.

But before trying to analyze whatever we may discover of what occurred there, it is critical to discern how it fits an overall picture.  For context, one must also see what the IMF and World Bank “communitarian” elitists are up to.

We find that before the Bretton Woods affair, focusing upon “new solutions,” there was a similar IMF meeting, called “New Ideas for a New World.”  It was centered upon “Post-Crisis Policy Making” and occurred March 7-14.  That gave some of them a lot of time to communicate and plan in quiet (the traditional word for that is conspire) when they were not attending official sessions, or making videos.

Then, we see that Soros’ April 8-11 conference ended just as the IMF and World Bank took up their April 11-17 Spring Meetings, just a limo ride away.  “Blossom of Spring, won’t you bloom and grow?”  Let us see what is budding in this intensive series of conferences, by the first one’s own promotional vid.

Here is a collection of pitches for “New Ideas for a New World.”  Hey, they left out the last word, “Order.”  Could it be that some of them know their version of order requires fomenting massive disorder first, the crises not to be wasted?  They also left out the word “Brave,” before “New World.”  Maybe that is because some of them like Huxley, have qualms.

This video puts their dexterous foot forward about that March 2011 conference, while their sinister footfalls go on.  So who are these dudes, getting together and yukking it up (well, three out of four globalist manipulators seem to approve) and just how spooky are they?  What are the messages of the Big Money priests, to the unwashed, PITI-ful masses of principal, interest, taxes, and insurance payers?

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Sarkozy in favour of an International Currency of Reference

Ahead of the G20 finance minister summit in Nanjing scheduled for today, the French president proposes to boost the capacity of the International Monetary Fund to supervise currency markets. He also wants Special Drawing Rights to become the currency of reference.

Asia News | Apr 1, 2011

Hong Kong – French President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to enlarge the G7 to better manage currency markets, expand the International Monetary Fund’s oversight capacity in the field, and to the IMF’s currency basket, Special Drawing Right (SDR), the currencies of emerging economies, like the Chinese yuan. The SDR is monetary unit of international reserve assets defined and maintained by the IMF itself. The French leader made the proposal at a G20 meeting of finance ministers in Nanjing, China.

“Greater supervision by the IMF” of nations’ balance of payments and reserves “appears indispensible,” Sarkozy said yesterday at a one-day seminar ahead of the summit.

For him, the proposal can become operative right away. “France supports modifying the IMF’s status to expand its oversight capacity,” he noted. This can counter what he views as a “proliferation of unilateral measures during crises resulting in a new financial protectionism in which all economies suffer”.

The G20, currently chaired by France, has been discussing ways to improve currency market stability and prevent currency wars.

Western nations, led by the United States, have been pressuring China to revalue the yuan, seriously underestimated in their view (by up to 40-45 per cent), and unjustly boosting Chinese exports on world markets.

The US Federal Reserve recently decided to buy hundreds of billions in US treasury bills, a measure many see as a way to tinker with the exchange rate at the expense of other currencies (see Maurizio d’Orlando, “Currency wars and the Fed’s demise,” in AsiaNews, 19 November 2010)

The French proposal has not been welcomed by either the Chinese or the Americans. “Global monetary reforms should be carried out in a pro-active and gradual way. The reform process will be a long-term and complex process,” Chinese Vice Premier Wang Qishan said in his opening remarks at the summit.

Years ago, Beijing first raised the issue of replacing the US dollar as the currency of reference with SDRs (see “Beijing reaffirms the urgent need to replace the dollar with a global currency,” in AsiaNews, 27 June 2009). However, it also does not want to lose control over its own currency.

As a barb against the French proposal on currency market reform, Chinese President Hu Jintao during a meeting with Sarkozy yesterday spoke about the crisis in Libya.

“The aim of the UN’s resolution is to stop violence and protect civilians,” he said. “If the military action brings disaster to innocent civilians and creates a bigger humanitarian crisis, that would violate the original intention of the Security Council resolution”.

US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner also criticised the French plan. For him, the biggest flaw in the current situation is the inconsistency in exchange rate policies. In a thinly veiled reference to China, he noted that some emerging countries ran tightly managed currency regimes that fuelled inflation risks in their own economies, magnified appreciation pressures in others and led to calls for protectionism.

Before any change is made to the SDR, countries “should have flexible exchange rate systems, independent central banks and permit the free movement of capital flows,” Geithner added.

At some level both Washington and Beijing do not want to rock the boat, the Americans because they do not want the dollar to lose its role as a currency of reference, and the Chinese do not want any sudden changes. As the world’s largest holder of foreign currency, two thirds in US dollars or US Securities, any rapid depreciation of the US currency would negatively affect China’s huge reserves.

Experts believe that Sarkozy himself does not expect any immediate results but rather that he is preparing the ground for the G20 summit in Cannes (France) in 2012. The goal is not only to seek a more “stable and resilient” monetary order, but also prepare himself for France’s presidential elections.

China now owns $1.16 trillion of U.S. debt

CBS | Feb 28, 2011

(Credit: CBS/AP)

(AP) WASHINGTON – China, the biggest buyer of U.S. Treasury securities, owns a lot more than previously estimated.

In an annual revision of the figures, the Treasury Department said Monday that China’s holdings totaled $1.16 trillion at the end of December. That was an increase of 30 percent from an estimate the government made two weeks ago.

The government made the change to its monthly report based on more accurate information it obtains in an annual survey. That survey more does a better job of determining the actual owners of Treasury securities.

China was firmly in the top spot as the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasury debt even before the revisions. But the big increase in Chinese holdings could ease fears that Chinese investors might begin dumping their U.S. holdings. Such a development could send U.S. interest rates rising. That would slow America’s economic recovery and increase Washington’s costs for financing the $14.3 trillion national debt.

China and Britain were the countries with the biggest revisions in the new report.

The amount of U.S. Treasury securities held by Britain fell to $272.1 billion in the new report. That’s a drop of $269.2 billion from the last monthly report which put the Britain’s holdings of U.S. debt at $541.3 billion. The holdings of the two countries often show big revisions when the annual report is released.

The reason for the change is that Chinese investors who purchase their Treasury securities in London are often counted as British investors. The more detailed annual report does a better job of tracking the countries in which investors reside as opposed to the location where investors make their purchases.

Even with the revision, Britain remained the third largest holder of U.S. Treasurys.

Japan had the second highest foreign holdings, totaling $882.3 billion at the end of December. The revision was only slightly below the original estimate.

The total foreign holdings of Treasury debt stood at $4.44 trillion at the end of December, according to the new report. That’s up 1.5 percent from the estimate made two weeks ago. About two-thirds of U.S. Treasurys owned overseas are held by foreign governments and central banks.

The U.S. government is selling huge amounts of debt to finance record-high budget deficits. The Obama administration in its new budget released on Feb. 14 projected that this year’s deficit will reach a record $1.65 trillion. It would be the third consecutive year the federal deficit has exceeded $1 trillion.

Federal Reserve ships U.S. dollars off to Europe

Federal Reserve opens credit line to Europe

The move comes after the European Union and International Monetary Fund pledged a nearly $1 trillion defense package for the embattled euro.

AP | May 9, 2010

by Jeannine Aversa

WASHINGTON – The Federal Reserve late Sunday opened a program to ship U.S. dollars to Europe in a move to head off a broader financial crisis on the continent.

Other central banks, including the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Japan also are involved in the dollar swap effort.

The move comes after the European Union and International Monetary Fund pledged a nearly $1 trillion defense package for the embattled euro, hoping to calm jittery markets and halt attacks on the eurozone’s weakest members. The ECB also jumped into the bond market Sunday night, saying it is ready to buy eurozone bonds to shore up liquidity in “dysfunctional” markets.

The Fed’s action reopens a program put in place during the 2008 global financial crisis under which dollars are shipped overseas through the foreign central banks. In turn, these central banks can lend the dollars out to banks in their home countries that are in need of dollar funding to prevent the European crisis from spreading further.

The Fed said action is being taken “in response to the reemergence of strains in U.S. dollar short-term funding markets in Europe,” and to prevent the spread of that strain to other markets and financial centers.

A so-called “swap” line with the Bank of Canada provides up to $30 billion. Figures weren’t provided for the other central banks. The arrangements are authorized through January 2011.

The debt crisis first erupted in Greece. Fears that it could spread to Spain, Portugal and other eurozone countries. The crisis has pushed up demand for the U.S. dollar and has sharply weakened the value of the euro, the currency used by 16 European countries. Eurozone ministers and the IMF this weekend approved a $140 billion rescue package of loans to Greece for the next three years to keep it from imploding.

The Fed had wound down these crisis-era programs with other central banks in February, along with other emergency programs to get lending flowing more freely again and return stability to financial markets. At that time, financial strains in the United States were easing, and the Fed began to take steps to move policy closer to normal.

It also had begun to lay out a plan to reel in the unprecedented stimulus money pumped out during the crisis. The Fed’s balance sheet ballooned to $2.3 trillion, more than double where it stood before the crisis struck. The program reopened on Sunday will expand the Fed’s balance sheet, economists say. However, the program poses little credit risk to the Fed because the arrangements are with other central banks, they added.

The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order

Photo: Bobby Yip/Reuters

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.

Related

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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CNBC – Dollar Will be Utterly Destroyed, Global Currency, New World Order

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

Secret meetings bring about demise of dollar for the New World Order

torn-dollar

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.

World Bank Head Sees Dollar’s Role Diminishing

dollar_toilet

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.”

Brazil after New World Order in economy

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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.

Putin: New Global Reserve Currencies Wouldn’t Harm US

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.