The bellicose USofA rulers, both of the deep state and the shallow one have the military juggernaut mauling hundreds of cities, towns and countrysides around the globe while posturing and threatening Russia, China, Iran and others with applied military power. That the bigger players may have plans other than losing militarily seems to be absent from Pentagon planning.
The usual suspects have also embarked on economic assaults against China, Russia and others. Here, too, the victims are anything but helpless.
The US Dollar Ponzi scheme is not exactly the rock from which intelligent people launch economic war on the rest of the world.
When nobody else will prop the US up, the Feral Reserve has to print money to buy its own money. Lifting yourself up by your boot laces doesn’t work. Somebody ought to clue them in.
Nevermind. Some people have to learn the hard way.
Just don’t you pin your future on their hot air balloon.
China cuts US investments by 92% amid escalating trade war
The US market saw a significant plunge in investment from China in the first five months of the year amid a growing trade row between the world’s two largest economies.
Chinese investments totaled $1.8 billion from January through May, representing a 92-percent drop against the same period a year ago. That’s the lowest level in seven years, according to the latest report by Rhodium Group, a research provider that tracks Chinese foreign investment.
Chinese corporations that had been pumping cash into the US to cement ties over a long period have cut their investments in recent years. In 2017, investments declined by 36 percent to $29.7 billion from $46.5 billion during the previous year.
Russia dumps half of its US Treasury bonds
Russia has held a major selloff of US Treasury bonds, dumping some $47bn-worth of papers and momentarily dropping six places on a list of major foreign holders of US securities, recently released statistics for April have shown.
In just one month, Russia proceeded to sell $47.4 billion out of the $96.1 billion the country had in US treasury bonds in March. The latest statistics released by the US Treasury Department on Friday showed that, in April, Russia had only $48.7bn in American assets, occupying 22nd place on the list of “major foreign holders of Treasury securities.”
China, which holds the most US Treasury bonds, also sold off some seven billion-worth of its American assets, from March to April, and now has $1.18 trillion invested in securities. Japan, which is positioned second on the list, in the same timeframe sold off some $12 billion, leaving just over a trillion dollars in US coffers. Ireland, which had $300.4 billion in April also managed to ditch over $17 billion in US assets.
A treasury bond is a fixed-interest government debt security with a maturity of more than 10 years. Treasury bonds make interest payments two times a year.
The mass selloff of US bonds by Russian follows numerous rounds of sanctions imposed by Washington against Moscow. The punitive measures targeted some of the most important sectors of the Russian economy, by limiting American financing available to Russian banks and business sectors across all major sectors.
Small Asian nation dumps dollar & yuan for gold amid growing global trade hostilities
China’s neighbor Kyrgyzstan has been piling up gold reserves as a hedge against a possible trade war between Beijing and Washington. The country is seeking to boost the share of gold in its $2-billion international reserves to 50 percent from its current 16 percent.
“The rules of the game are changing,” Kyrgyz Central Bank Governor Tolkunbek Abdygulov told Bloomberg in an interview. “It doesn’t matter what currencies we have in our reserves; dollars, yuan or rubles all make us vulnerable.”
The Kyrgyz currency, the som, slumped to a record low in 2015 following steep depreciation of the Russian ruble amid an oil crisis and stand-off with the West. Since then, the country boosted the share of gold in its reserves from 8 to 15 percent.
Gold is Kyrgyzstan’s largest export. Since 2014, the country’s central bank has been buying up as much of the country’s gold as possible, Abdygulov said.
“If we decide to sell gold, then we can easily sell it and convert into the currency we need,” Abdygulov said. “Taking into consideration that we mine a lot of gold in our country, it’s God-given that we should keep a large part of our reserves in gold.”