P&D Geopolitical Edition

By Rich Kozlovich 

Have you ever heard of BRICS nations?  BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, who are attempting to end the U.S. dollar as the world's reserve currency, and wish to dominate the world's economy, mostly being pushed by China, and there's a lot of money involved and they "represent" around 3 billion of the world's population, and I use the word "represent" loosely.  And a lot of problems.

5 factors limiting the impact of the BRICS nations, which makes it clear this is all about China and their desire to dominate the world, all of which is now and will always be the fly in the ointment.  So in my really unsophisticated opinion, who cares?  Remember, this stuff makes my eyes roll up into the back of my head.  

This article article by Rebecca Holcomb,  What happens if the United States loses its world reserve currency status?, tries to explain it, and it isn't pretty, but I don't know if it's represents reality.  The main problem regarding the dollar as I see it is the national debt, and the unending devaluation of the dollar through inflation.  These countries are all fake economies.  They aren't capital generating nations, they can't create their own national markets to sustain any kind of growing economy.  

The U.S. has a huge internal market, and is a natural capital generating nation with an unending capacity for innovation.  We can grow our own food, generate all our energy needs internally, develop our own armament, defend the nation on our own, and if the nation's leaders would just do it, pay off the national debt with the 150 trillion dollars in assets of the federal government. 

As I said, all this stuff makes my eyes roll back into my head, but my grandfather was one of the world's great economists.  He said if you spend more than you make, you'll go broke, and China's broke.  China is central to this scheme, and yet they can't create it's own internal market to sustain their expansion economically or militarily, and other than coal, they seriously lack energy resources. 

These nations need the U.S. Does the U.S. need these other nations?  

I'll have more on this later, but if the Russo/Ukrainian War wasn't so terrible to so many innocent people, it would be laughable.  No one was prepared for this invasion, including Putin.  Everyone is running out of military hardware.  Ukraine needs far more munitions daily than the west has totally.  The western nations are depleting their own defensive stock by giving it to Ukraine.  So much so that when this over Ukraine may be one of the most militarized nations on Earth.  

Russia is buying drones from Iran, and they're negotiating with the Taliban for used U.S. military equipment left behind by Biden in Afghanistan.  Putin is recruiting massive numbers, but massive numbers are leaving Russia to avoid being drafted, and no on believes any of these young men will be properly trained or equipped.     

Putin is outraged the west is going to supply advanced aircraft, calling it an escalation.  Ya gotta give it to Putin for brass.  He starts a war, and undeclared war, with a nation with little military capacity, and then is outraged when it goes against him calling their efforts to defend themselves an escalation.  No, this invasion was the escalation, going from peace to war was the escalation, not what Ukraine is doing. 

There's a lot more going on regarding economics, and Russia is in trouble, economically, militarily, industrially, and most importantly, demographically.  The surrounding nations are no longer intimidated my Russia and are making a lot of economic decisions that over the long haul is going to diminish Russia.  

Is Ukraine any better off? No, but at this point, they don't need to be as they're being completely subsidized by western nations, especially the U.S., but that can't and won't last forever.  I do think there has to be a settlement soon.  This has exhausted the world and has exposed incredible weaknesses in all nations involved, including the U.S.