At first, the idea that some powerful Americans want to end the Dollar’s global role seems strange. That role gives America what the French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing called “exorbitant privilege” - the ability to borrow cheaply and in vast quantities on international markets. As people always need your currency, they’ll always lend you more money. When that borrowing funds your military and role as a superpower, it becomes more than a privilege; it’s an existential necessity.

So, what Americans would want to give it up and why? The people who want to are the libertarians and far-right who currently hold sway in Washington. Names like JD Vance, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Joe Lonsdale.

But why? They want a revolutionary collapse of the old order so a new libertarian, far-right Christian Nationalist America can be reborn out of the total destruction of the old. If that means the evaporation of most people’s savings, as the Lord Farquaad meme from Shrek goes, ‘Some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make.’

How likely is any of this? All of the rest of their plans from the annexation of Greenland and dissolving NATO are advancing, exactly as they planned them. The current US President believes in bankruptcy & defaulting on debts, and he’s been persuaded around to the rest of their plans.

Where does this leave the rest of the world? The Euro & Renminbi don’t have the Dollar’s reach or versatility, but maybe the world will be forced out of necessity to found a new global financial order based on them.

The Wide Angle: Peter Thiel and the American Apocalypse

  • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    It’s simpler than that.

    The current US government is a Russian puppet, and the collapse of the US is for their benefit. It doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.

    • edible_funk@sh.itjust.works
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      23 hours ago

      There is that but there’s also the technofeudalists and christofascists that also genuinely want the dissolution of America and they’re more or less openly working with Russia and each other.

    • hector@lemmy.today
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      1 day ago

      The current us government is an Israeli cuckold too. A gimp of Israel perhaps.

      Both Israel and Russia appear to have serious blackmail on our leader and other politicians and business dickheads.

      Israel much more so, it appears the cia helped them, with epstein, allowing a foreign government to accrue blackmail on the ivy league that staffs all top jobs in business and govt. And in the uk in their equivalent pig fucking clubs for the swells like cameron the known sodomizer of dead pigs for hazing in one such club. But I digress…

      As if there was any doubt the prez was compromised to russia, after helsinki even the uninformed should have known, and medvedickhead all but bragged they had some of the epstein files that israel was using to cuckold america, this last summer.

      • HairyHarry@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        It could be even simpler than blackmail. People do things for money. The more money they get the more they will probably do.

        • hector@lemmy.today
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          1 day ago

          They are not mutually exclusive. The blackmail is real. The president is a lifelong blackmailer too of his own accord. It is his wonderful secret, such an enigma.

          But there is a critical mass of them, and it pulls along the rest of the establishment, even that are not getting rich or being blackmailed. Yet their donors still are often.

          Epstein was unquestionably a honeypot operation. It explains a lot.

  • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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    1 day ago

    When Nixon “temporarily” suspended the gold convertibility of the USD, it was one of the greatest thefts in history.

    • hector@lemmy.today
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      1 day ago

      The official exchange of money for gold that underpinned breton woods was off from the price it was sold privately, and hedge fund type parasites were arbitraging, buying and selling simultaneously to make risk free profits. As such the gold was physically being depleted, we held the lion’s share after ww2 and it was significantly depleted from this arbitrage. As I understand it.

      The system now is shit. But the gold underpinnings were broken. If only we had a roosevelt or truman or eisenhower maybe they would have shorn up the fixed exchange rates of breton woods pinning other currencies to the dollar and the dollar to a set amount of gold, on demand money exchanged for gold.

      But we had nixon and chiseling cynical conservatives so we got the free market model, a free for all.

  • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    There is no rational reason to do this whatsoever. But the people in charge are all deeply psychotic so all bets are off.

    • porcoesphino@mander.xyz
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      1 day ago

      There is no rational reason to do this whatsoever

      For the US government to aim to have the world drop the US dollar as the global reserve? For US citizens to listen to Peter Thiel? Something else?

      • porcoesphino@mander.xyz
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        20 hours ago

        Why the downvotes for asking for clarification on a statement that is ambiguous and unclear for at least one person, so presumably some others?

  • Skunk@jlai.lu
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    1 day ago

    So Gilead Republic it is.

    FFS, The Handmaid’s Tales was a book of fiction, not a fucking user manual.