Home » Posts tagged 'export'

Tag Archives: export

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Venezuela Has Officially Abandoned The Petrodollar – Does This Make War With Venezuela More Likely?

September 15, 2017

Venezuela Has Officially Abandoned The Petrodollar – Does This Make War With Venezuela More Likely?

Venezuela is the 11th largest oil producing country in the entire world, and it has just announced that it is going to stop using the petrodollar.  Most Americans don’t even know what the petrodollar is, but for those of you that do understand what I am talking about, this should send a chill up your spine.  The petrodollar is one of the key pillars of the global financial system, and it allows us to live a far higher standard of living than we actually deserve.  The dominance of the petrodollar has been very jealously guarded by our government in the past, and that is why many are now concerned that this move by Venezuela could potentially lead us to war.

I don’t know why this isn’t headline news all over the country, but it should be.  One of the few major media outlets that is reporting on this is the Wall Street Journal…

The government of this oil-rich but struggling country, looking for ways to circumvent U.S. sanctions, is telling oil traders that it will no longer receive or send payments in dollars, people familiar with the new policy have told The Wall Street Journal.

Before we go any further, we should discuss what we mean by the “petrodollar” for those that are not familiar with the concept.  The following comes from an excellent article by Christopher Doran…

In a nutshell, any country that wants to purchase oil from an oil producing country has to do so in U.S. dollars. This is a long standing agreement within all oil exporting nations, aka OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The UK for example, cannot simply buy oil from Saudi Arabia by exchanging British pounds. Instead, the UK must exchange its pounds for U.S. dollars. The major exception at present is, of course, Iran.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

China: A 5-Year Plan And 50 Million Jobs Lost

March 7, 2016

China: A 5-Year Plan And 50 Million Jobs Lost


Arnold Genthe San Francisco , Chinatown. The street of the gamblers at night 1900
China never had an actual economic model or growth model. It simply printed an obscene amount of money, especially after 2008, and used it to build factories, 30-story see-through apartment blocks and highways into nowhere cities, without giving much if any thought to where this would lead when their formerly rich western customers had less to spend on its ever increasing amount of ever more useless products, or when its workers would stop spending ever more on apartments as investments, or when no more roads and bridges were needed because nowhere was already in plain sight. Or all of the above. It was ‘to infinity and beyond’ from the start, but that’s a line from a kids’ fantasy story, not a 5-year plan or an economic model.

Going into its 10-day, 3,000 delegates National People’s Congress opening on Friday, China was facing -and very much still is- two major and interconnected problems. Both are problems that the country has never faced before -not a minor point to make. The first is a giant debt load, one that could easily be as high as $40 trillion, or 350% of GDP, once one includes the shadow banking system (watch the shadows!). The second is the Communist Party’s -economic- credibility.

The debt problem is impossible to solve without very far-reaching restructurings of both the debt itself and of the entire Chinese economy. There appears to be a problem within the problem, however: the Party neither looks prepared to truly tackle the debt nor does it seem to know how.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bank of Canada Crushes Loonie, Creates Mother of All Shorts

December 12, 2015

Bank of Canada Crushes Loonie, Creates Mother of All Shorts

Clear winners: rich Chinese who buy homes in Canada.

The Canadian dollar swooned 1% against the US dollar on Friday, to US$0.7270, after having gotten hammered for the past six of seven trading days. It’s down 5% in November so far, 15.5% year-to-date, and 31% from its post-Financial Crisis peak of $1.06 in April 2011. It hit the lowest level since June 2004.

The commodities rout would have been bad enough. Given the importance of commodities to the Canadian economy, the multi-year decline in the prices of metals, minerals, and natural gas, and then starting in mid-2014, the devastating plunge of the price of oil, would have been sufficient in driving down the loonie.

That the Fed has tapered QE out of existence last year and has been waffling and flip-flopping about rate hikes ever since made the until then beaten-down US dollar, at the time the most despised currency in the universe, less despicable – at the expense of the loonie.

Those factors would have been enough to knock down the loonie. But it wasn’t enough, not for the ambitious Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz. The man’s got a plan.

He is in an all-out currency war. He’s out to crush the loonie beyond what other forces are already accomplishing. He’s out to pulverize it, and no one knows how far he’ll go, or where he’ll stop, or if he’ll ever stop. He has singlehandedly created the short of a lifetime.

It should spook every Canadian with income and assets denominated in Canadian dollars and those wanting to buy a home in Canada (we’ll get to that bitter irony in a moment).

Poloz has been in office since June 2013, and this is what he has accomplished so far:

Canada-CAD-USD-2009_2015-12

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress