Category: Aggregated

Reports about the April 19 IMF report featured the warning of a general debt blowout if Greece leaves the euro, or the Federal Reserve raises interest rates too soon or too fast. But the report also contained a highly unusual and important admission: The biggest London banks have been running a trillion-dollar “carry trade” speculation into China, violating that country’s regulations and attempting to manipulate its currency, the yuan.

To take one exemplary story about the IMF report, that of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the London Telegraph April 20: “Borrowing in dollars outside the U.S. has surged from $2 trillion to $9 trillion over the past 15 years [due to Bank of Japan and Fed quantitative easing—ed.]. Half of this is now concentrated in emerging markets…. It includes at least $1.1 trillion of loans to Chinese companies, much of it through Hong Kong, and intended to circumvent China’s internal credit curbs. It is now clear that many banks and investors have been engaged in a currency “carry trade,” betting — wrongly, as it now turns out — that the dollar would weaken against the yuan.”

Much could be said about this in regard to why there are real estate and commodity bubbles in the Chinese economy.

But what is most relevant is that all of the trans-Atlantic governments, at every G7 and G20 meeting of this century, have relentlessly demanded that China allow the value of the yuan to rise, backed by tirades on the subject from members of Congress and European parliaments and from nearly all trade unions, chambers of commerce, etc.

It turns out, that they were all screaming at China, all that time, to support the City of London banks’ Hong Kong carry trade speculations, which required for their super-profitability that the yuan keep rising in value. Under that international pressure China did allow the yuan to rise, slowly but steadily, for years.

But the government of Xi Jinping reversed that policy in 2014, in order to finally enforce its own currency-control policies, which Evans-Pritchard referred to, against the operations of the London banks in Hong Kong.

Result: London and Wall Street speculations “reversed,” and big banks lost money. Result: Now some Congressional Democrats object to Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) swindle, not so much because it is an attack on the United States, but that it is not enough of an attack on China. Like New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, they say they oppose the TPP; but, they might vote for it if accompanied by a “currency manipulator” designation on China.

Tell the truth, Senator: It is your “constituents” in Wall Street boardrooms, led by their more clever London counterparts, who have been manipulating China’s currency, along with rigging international interest rates, foreign exchange markets, gold prices, etc., etc. That has ended with the emergence of the new policy of the BRICS. Obama’s TPP is part of an attempt to provoke war with China and Russia. Oppose him.

The Russian Defense Ministry official representative, Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said Thursday that Moscow hoped the Department of State would be rid of its status as a whirlpool of absurd declarations after the former spokesperson, Jen Psaki, quit her position, TASS reported yesterday.

“However, we were mistaken, since the claims voiced by the new spokesperson, Marie Harf, about the concentration of the highest amount of Russian air defense systems in eastern Ukraine since August, again astonish us with the level of their incompetence,” General Konashenkov said.

Marie Harf claimed earlier that the increasingly complicated nature of training courses for the Donbass separatists “leaves no doubt that Russia is involved” — i.e., as usual, the claims of troops, tanks, air defenses, etc. come with no effort to provide any evidence.

General Konashenkov joked: “The Russian Defense Ministry will not be surprised if it hears one of these days that Russia is accused of rolling out a strike group of aircraft carriers in the Lugansk region, or of an illegal entry into the First City Pond in Donetsk by a Russian nuclear submarine.”

He said such statements aim to stir public commotion ahead of the NATO summit, due in Antalya on May 13-14.

He added, however, that the very real concern is that the U.S. training of Kiev troops, which began this week, is on the storming of buildings in urban districts, and is taking place “in the areas adjoining the zones of conflict in Mariupol, Severodonetsk, Artyomovsk, and Volnovakha,” despite claims to the contrary from Washington.

The world is on the verge of thermonuclear World War III. The reasons usually given for the confrontation between the US and Russia are bullshit. Rather, there are some people who intend for this to happen. “We are on the verge of virtual extinction, as the result of chain-reaction effects” of the madness of the British Empire and their Wall Street lackies faced with the end of their bankrupt system, Lyndon LaRouche said on April 21. Their failure to surrender their weakening grip on power, will drive them, in desperation, to have Obama launch World War III. “This is the first threat of human extinction in modern history,” LaRouche concluded.

Former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright, and retired Russian General Vladimir Dvorkin, warned, in an April 19 op-ed in the New York Times entitled “How To Avert a Nuclear War,” against one highly likely scenario for how World War III might happen. Cartwright, prior to joining the Joint Chiefs, was commander of US Strategic Command. Dvorkin, in a long career that spanned from 1958 until 2001, played a key role in the 1960’s development of Russia’s submarine-based nuclear deterrent, and later in the strategic arms talks of the 1970’s. These are two men intimately familiar with the strategic nuclear forces of their respective countries, including the command and control systems over those forces.

In their op-ed, Cartwright and Dvorkin proposed that both the US and Russia should eliminate the launch-on-warning concept from their nuclear strategies. They note, at the outset, the increasing strategic tensions between the US and Russia—tensions that diplomacy has done little to ease. “This makes it all the more critical for Russia and the United States to talk, to relieve the pressures to ‘use or lose’ nuclear forces during a crisis, and minimize the risk of a mistaken launch,” they write. “The fact is that we are still living with the nuclear-strike doctrine of the Cold War, which dictated three strategic options: first strike, launch on warning, and post-attack retaliation.” From there, they focus their attention on launch-on-warning, for which the potential of an accidental launch, or a launch based on false information, is very high,— aggravated by short warning times and Russia’s compromised warning systems (Russia currently has no operating early warning satellites, depends only on ground-based radar systems). As a result, the timelines, they write, “are very compressed and the opportunities for ill-considered decisions very real.”

“This risk should motivate the presidents of Russia and the United States to decide in tandem to eliminate the launch-on-warning concept from their nuclear strategies,” they write. “They should reinstitute military-to-military talks, which were suspended over the Ukraine crisis, to pursue this stand-down as an urgent priority.” Such talks, however, are very unlikely as long as the insane Barack Obama is president of the United States.

“In periods of heightened tensions and reduced decision times, the likelihood of human and technical error in control systems increases,” they conclude. “Launch-on-warning is a relic of Cold War strategy whose risk today far exceeds its value. Our leaders urgently need to talk and, we hope, agree to scrap this obsolete protocol before a devastating error occurs.”

Now you can’t say that you weren’t warned.