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America, Zoellick says, can no longer rely on the dollar ruling the roost. The euro and the Chinese renminbi are candidates to become reserve currencies
Simms
"We are balanced on a knife edge,"
"The potentialities are wonderful; the probabilities deeply disturbing."
www.guardian.co.uk...
The wrenching financial crisis of the past two years will provide the catalyst for a profound change in the global economy – which, according to the man running the World Bank, will see China and India become established centres of power, the dollar eclipsed as the sole reserve currency, and Latin America, south-east Asia and Africa emerge as new sources of growth.
But as he surveys the wreckage caused by what the bank and its sister organisation, the International Monetary Fund, agree is the most severe crisis since the devastation caused by the second world war, Robert Zoellick is surprisingly upbeat about the future.
Asked by the Observer how he envisages the global economy in 20 years' time, Zoellick says: "There will certainly be a larger role for the emerging powers, there will be multipolar sources of growth, there will be more south-south trade between developing countries....
......
Zoellick says that, while this does not mean the end of the US as a big player on the world stage, it has brought the curtain down on the unipolar world that followed the collapse of communism 20 years ago....
Andrew Simms, head of policy at the New Economics Foundation thinktank, says: "One major thing that will describe the landscape in 2029 is that we will be beyond the point of peak oil. That will be the trigger for so many dominoes to fall." Decisions made in the next few years, he adds, will be critical. "There is the risk of enormous knock-on effects on trade and food supply, with the food price volatility of the last year looking like a vicar's tea party."
He believes food security will replace gross domestic product as the yardstick of success, and there will be an emphasis on the new "three Rs" – reduce, repair, recycle.
In one respect, Zoellick, Strauss-Kahn and Simms are in full agreement: decisions taken in the next two or three years will shape the next two or three decades.
UN calls for new reserve currency
Oct 6 07:17 AM US/Eastern
www.breitbart.com...
The United Nations called on Tuesday for a new global reserve currency to end dollar supremacy which has allowed the United States the "privilege" of building a huge trade deficit.
"Important progress in managing imbalances can be made by reducing the reserve currency country?s 'privilege' to run external deficits in order to provide international liquidity," UN undersecretary-general for economic and social affairs, Sha Zukang, said.
Speaking at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Istanbul, he said: "It is timely to emphasise that such a system also creates a more equitable method of sharing the seigniorage derived from providing global liquidity."
Big oil producing nations denied a British newspaper report on Tuesday that Gulf Arab states were in secret talks with Russia, China, Japan and France to replace the U.S. dollar with a basket of currencies in trading oil.
ca.reuters.com...
The dollar eased in response to the report, which was written by The Independent's Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk and cited unidentified sources in Gulf Arab states and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong.
It said the proposal was for trade in crude oil to move over nine years to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen, the Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, which includes Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
The report coincides with a wider debate on the role of the dollar as the world's reserve currency, which has come under question. For most of this decade, the United States has struggled to maintain the dollar's value.
But top officials of Saudi Arabia and Russia, speaking on the sidelines of International Monetary Fund meetings in Istanbul, denied there were such talks. The two countries are the world's largest and second-largest oil exporters.
More at Link...
Guest Post: China Defaults, Currency Basket Threatens Dollar
www.zerohedge.com...
Robert Fisk exposed revived discussions by the Gulf States, China, France, Japan, Brazil, and Russia to replace the dollar as the benchmark oil trading currency with a basket of currencies including gold within 10 years. This proposal is not new and discussions have been ongoing for decades. But other extraordinary moves in the capital markets suggest we should take this threat to the dollar’s position very seriously. For example, China has $2.3 trillion in currency reserves (about 70% in dollars), and China knows how to get its way.
In November 2008, Chinese banks said they would no longer play by our rules. Top tier banks (Bank of China and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China) reneged on derivatives contracts. They failed to come up with billions in collateral on dollar/yen FX trades, which were out of the money after the yen’s October appreciation. This should have been headline news in every financial newspaper, but it wasn’t.
Chinese banks defaulted. They may have been partially motivated by U.S. malfeasance in the capital markets that caused losses in Asia. The U.S. squandered its credibility and our cover-ups have done nothing to restore it.
Originally posted by burdman30ott6
Drill baby, drill! There is plenty of oil sitting underneath the United States and more than plenty natural gas sitting under Alaska. We tap it, we distribute it, and we become self sufficient in gas and oil, plus we enact regulations prohibiting trade of any American supplied oil with nations that use this new "basket of currency."
Let's see how OPEC likes not having the US purchasing oil from them anymore.
RS Write-up
AP obtained Geithner’s appointment calendars through a FOIA request. The calendars reveal what readers of Infowars already knew — Geithner and the Treasury Department take orders from Citigroup Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
Geithner is a consummate Wall Street insider. He was the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He was a Senior Fellow in the International Economics department of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Group of Thirty (a Rockefeller operation), worked for Kissinger Associates, and is a member of the Trilateral Commission. Lawrence Summers was his mentor. He is a Robert Rubin protégé. Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, was Chairman of Citigroup. Summers, also a Clinton Treasury Secretary, was Chief Economist for the World Bank and was tapped by Obama to be the director of the White House National Economic Council. Geithner also sits on the board of the Bank for International Settlements, the mega-globalist outfit that enjoys immunity from virtually all regulation, scrutiny and accountability.
“Geithner had more contacts with Citigroup than he did with Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., the lawmaker leading the effort to approve Geithner’s overhaul of the financial system. Geithner’s contacts with [Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs] alone outnumber his contacts with Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.” Source
Quote from : Wikipedia : Ted Kaczynski
Theodore John Kaczynski (pronounced /kəˈzɪnski/; born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber (University and Airline Bomber), is an American mathematician, social critic, and murderer who carried out a campaign of mail bombings, as well as a described anarcho-primitivist.
Amazon Review :
Within ten years, Gelernter (Computer Science/Yale) predicts here, scientists will deploy computer systems able to capture extensive data about a particular "reality'' (hospital, city, etc.), and to present a constantly updated model on a desktop computer.
"A Mirror World is some huge institution's moving, true-to- life mirror image trapped inside a computer--where you can see and grasp it whole,'' Gelernter writes.
Citizens will be able to visit these computer models like public squares, gaining unprecedented access to data on what's going on (and the officials in charge, the author intimates, will presumably welcome a chance to have their performance monitored).
Building such mirror worlds will be extraordinarily difficult: streams and rivers of raw data need to be constantly flowing; thousands of computers must process the data in parallel fashion; and tying it all together will demand new kinds of software of immense complexity.
Gelernter explains clearly the problems to be solved and describes pieces of the technology already working in research labs.
Left unchallenged is his assumption that such technology will remain benign--giving honest folk a way of grasping an ever-more complex world instead of providing the powerful owners of such technology a superb way to distort and control "reality.''
Plausible but potentially frightening view of what the future could hold if those who view "reality'' as merely a vast array of numbers waiting to be crunched have their way.
(Twenty illustrations--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
The dollar's position as the world's leading reserve currency faces increased pressure as the financial crisis allows emerging economies greater influence on the world stage, analysts said.
A report last week in The Independent claiming that China, Russia and Gulf States are among nations prepared to ditch the dollar for oil trades has heightened the uncertainty surrounding the US currency's future.......
........at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, whose President Robert Zoellick recently warned that the United States should not "take for granted" the dollar's role as preeminent global reserve currency.
Meanwhile at a G20 summit in Pittsburgh last month, world leaders unveiled a new vision for economic governance, with bold plans to fix global imbalances and give more clout to emerging giants such as China and India.
Following the summit, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner repeated Washington's commitment to a strong dollar.
But last week the finance chief was left to watch as traders used The Independent's report as an opportunity to push lower the troubled US unit.
The report "has helped concentrate the minds of traders and investors alike, and has given them another excuse to take the dollar lower," GFT Global Markets analyst David Morrison told AFP.
"Despite what the Fed and other central bankers say, a weaker dollar is desirable because it is necessary to rebalance the global economy.