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Showing posts from January, 2023

Russia, China and the new world order

 The war in Ukraine has now moved into its winter phase, and will not start in earnest again until the end of  March as the "mud" season comes to an end.  The recent wins by Ukrain's military forces (unexpected by most commentators) have left the country and the world with several interesting options (1) the threat of a Nuclear strike is now off the table since the reason for such an attack on the West was driven by a desire to disrupt the flow of arms; the Ukrain military forces find themselves with five or six more times the amount of weapon than they did during the opening sequence of the war nearly 8 months ago, (2) There is only one waterway access to the Crimean peninsula without that water more than 2 million Ukrainian Russians and the Russian military forces are at risk of running out of water (3) Sanctions against Russia are only now starting to really bite, and it's going to get worse before it gets better (4) the real issue for Russia is the potential shutt

30 years later: Money and Banking

 I was listening to a blog about money and what it is, the reason was a discussion on the fact that the Federal Reserve has been unable to control the money supplier for some time.  In fact, we are not talking about 2008 but much earlier, we are talking of the late 1980s when the Federal Reserve "discovered" the Eurodollar and its influence on US monetary policy. Eurodollars were invented outside the US monetary system, and it was not controlled by the US in any shape or form.  It emerged in the early 1970s as international finance started to grow.  Even then the US government (via the federal reserve) had no control or even aspiration to control the Eurodollar -- laissez-faire was the order of the day since it didn't impact the US money supply or interest rates (however, it did impact liquidity). on the other side of the world China' has always hoped for the impossible dream; the Yuan becoming a trading currency.   There are several problems with this dream; first is