"one of the biggest stories in the world and nobody is talking about it"
As a marxist, I’ve always known that an indispensable resource for understanding what is happening in the political economy of the country and the world is the business press. It’s the place where capitalists are required to rigorously and honestly take stock of the present state of, and ongoing developments in, what we call the infrastructure.
Thus, I came across this video from a channel called Inside China Business, by a guy named Kevin Walmsley, who has lived and worked in China since 2012 for a company called Direct Equipment. The video is entitled, bluntly, “The BRICS trading system is already wiping out US farmers, as global price discovery is destroyed” and it gives a concrete analysis, which surprised me, of how the BRICS system has already upended the global commodities trading system that was “for a hundred years” based on the U.S. dollar and essentially managed from Chicago. As he says, “This is one of the biggest stories in the world, and nobody is talking about it”—because few people know how. He knows how.
He talks about how the BRICS are developing
a new global trading system, which is completely independent of the U.S.-led system based on U.S. dollar trading and the SWIFT bank system. the system that we use in western countries … that has obvious advantages to us and obvious disadvantages to everyone else. If we're honest with ourselves there is no logical reason why a farmer in Brazil who's selling soybeans to China should use an American bank or the exchange in Chicago to make the deal happen, or need U.S. dollars to do so….Now, China, Brazil, and the other BRICS have the technology to build their own system, buying and selling directly without U.S. dollars, without Western banks, and without going through commodities traders and going through exchanges in Chicago.
And he gives specific examples of how this has already caused havoc in the U.S. economy—not only because of lost business to the tune of 1.5 million tons of wheat contracts, but because the U.S. has lost the ability to see why business has been lost, where it’s going, and at what prices. The dollar-denominated system gave the U.S.—and specifically Chicago mercantile and futures exchanges—total surveillance of the global commodities market, with all the advantages that implies. The BRICS system has now rendered the U.S. blind to all that.
Earlier this year, China set off alarm bells when they canceled huge wheat orders from the U.S. and from Australia...China canceled 240,000 tons of U.S. soft red, then came back the following Friday, canceled 264,000 tons. China called up Australia and canceled 1 million tons from there. The cancellation was the biggest ever.
Chicago is where our biggest agricultural exchanges are. We spend a lot of money for Bloomberg to tell us what's going on, but they don't know either where China bought 1.5 million tons of wheat to replace their canceled buys from the US and from Australia. They don't know, and so neither do the farmers who rely on Chicago grains analysts or on Bloomberg to tell them what's going on. I mean here that the farmers in the United States and Australia planted 1.5 million tons of wheat, and then China canceled them.
But nobody knows who filled that demand....So they are getting their demand filled from somewhere. We just don't know where…it was outside our system.We only learned about it later.
The BRICS countries are doing giant volumes of business now outside of our systems and outside the dollar. This is a billion-dollar problem for a Chicago bank that makes risk-free profits every year just processing trades. But for tens of thousands of farmers outside Chicago, it's a million-dollar problem.
So, the effect of the BRICS initiative is already real and growing: “this transformation of global trade to a non-US dollar-denominated system outside SWIFT and with immediate settlement…is going to hurt all of our producers in the extractive and agricultural industries first. Oil companies, miners, and farmers.”
Indeed, “2019 was the first time that the United States had a trade deficit in agriculture. Since then, we've run big trade deficits in agriculture for four out of six years, and this year we will hit a record.”
As he summarizes: “The BRICS countries are building a new system and they're almost finished. And that means that our system is almost finished too.”
This video gives a clear peek at the seismic disturbance in the core of the political economy of the world that is cracking up the “unipolar” Pangea of the American empire, a shock that reverberates through the various military provocations the U.S. ruling class is using to try and keep it together. The tectonic productive economic force of Russia, China, India, and the rest of the non-Euro-American world is impossible for the crumbling financialized U.S.-dominated redoubt to contain. Whether anyone wants it or not, and whatever its ultimate effects are, the United States and its clients will no longer rule the world and every region thereof economically, and therefore militarily (“Full Spectrum Dominance”), as it (almost) has since the demise of the Soviet Union.
That will not, however, stop the U.S. from sanctioning, color-changing, and militarily threatening every non-compliant country. Per this video, the U.S. is learning, but has not yet accepted, that these tools—including the hammer of military threat—are getting less effective every day. Unfortunately, the U.S. will likely not forgo its hammer until it’s smashed on a rock it just couldn’t believe was there.
This video also helps us understand why, for example, Russia, even though it’s successfully confronting US/NATO in Ukraine, is going to be very careful about acting in ways that alienate BRICS partners like India and Brazil—countries that are still also subject to American pressure. Russia has a twin imperative: defeat NATO/Ukraine and preserve BRICS. Ditto Iran in the Palestine-Israel context. These countries understand that strengthening and growing the alternative structure of global political economy is the fundament of a stable new multipolar world, and that military actions should best be calibrated to avoid breaking up that movement in one of the many ways the world’s U.S.-dominated institutional and media apparatuses will constantly try to do.
So, watch and learn how to understand one of the biggest stories in the world that nobody is talking about:
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