Privatization and of the U.S. economy has obliged employers and labor to bear the rentier costs, including higher housing prices and rising debt over… - Michael Hudson

The end of America’s unchallenged global economic dominance has arrived sooner than expected, thanks to the very same Neocons who gave the world the Iraq, Syria and the dirty wars in Latin America... The United State['s]... violent regime change warfare against Venezuela and Syria – and threatening other countries with sanctions if they do not join this crusade – is driving European and other nations to create their alternative financial institutions....

China, like Russia, has been reducing its dollar holdings as much as possible, just keeping enough to prevent the currency from being destabilized by the dollar inflows. China, Russia are buying gold instead of U.S. dollars as much as possible. China is trying to escape from buying Treasury securities. Why would any government want to buy Treasury securities yielding 0.1% when the dollars coming into China are trying to make loans or buying countries, making 15% profit or interest a year? Nobody would want that situation to continue. China doesn’t want it to continue. As long as it [China] is part of an international economy that is dollarized, it [China] is forced to take a loss, a sacrifice, year after year, subsidizing the U.S. economy. The only way that it can avoid that is to isolate itself from the U.S. dollar. No country until this time since 1945 has ever had the critical mass to be able to do it. That is the objective, the stated objective of Russia, China and their allies. Of course, they don’t want to buy treasury bills. That doesn’t mean that, yes, they found a wonderful investment making 0.1% a year and subsidizing the United States. That is not what China or any other country wants.

Is the proxy war in Ukraine turning out to be only a lead-up to something larger, involving world famine and a foreign-exchange crisis for food- and oil-deficit countries? Many more people are likely to die of famine and economic disruption than on the Ukrainian battlefield. It thus is appropriate to ask whether what appeared to be the Ukraine proxy war is part of a larger strategy to lock in U.S. control over international trade and payments. We are seeing a financially weaponized power grab by the U.S. Dollar Area over the Global South as well as over Western Europe. Without dollar credit from the United States and its IMF subsidiary, how can countries stay afloat? How hard will the U.S. act to block them from de-dollarizing, opting out of the U.S. economic orbit? U.S. Cold War strategy is not alone in thinking how to benefit from provoking a famine, oil and balance-of-payments crisis. Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum worries that the world is overpopulated – at least with the “wrong kind” of people. As... Bill Gates has explained: “Population growth in Africa is a challenge.”