131–140 of 496 posts
Ah, yes, the best way to react to increased authoritarianism in the US is to checks notes begin doing more business with a country that is the final word in authoritarianism.
Basically Yugoslavia's foreign policy during the Cold War, but on a much bigger scale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a little confusing, but technically RMB (renminbi) is the official name of the currency and CNY (yuan) is the base unit of the currency. Think of it like the difference between USD ("US Dollar") vs "dollar and cents", except there is no fractional yuan equivalent of cents, so it's all just yuan.
No there are cents, they are called fen (分). It's in Japan that it's all just Yen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Historically a more multipolar world has been a more violent and chaotic world, but maybe this time will be better.
Well I wouldn't say it's peaceful now, or has been in the past... Actually there's few years that the US wasn't at war.
The US wields incredible negotiating power and hegemony because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Like the British pound and the Dutch guilder before it, if that loses reserve currency status it will be harder to borrow on favorable terms, which would affect the entire US economy. This is a big step in that perhaps starting to happen over the next few decades.
As other people on this thread will point out the Yuan is not close to replacing the dollar, nor is any other aspect of the Chinese financial system highly competitive, even with the staggering rise of corruption in the US. But this is yet another indicator of the loss of soft power, which is much farther gone than, I'd say, 90% of Americans realize. The supposedly smart people in the tech industry should be alarmed…
For some people in Europe now, they think about whether the thing they are buying/subscribing to is in the US or owned by a US company in a way that simply didn't happen in the recent past.
The end of the Petro Dollar? Soviet-China-Iran - Petro Yuan? /edit for the pedantic. Russian Federation.
There won't be a petro-anything. In 30 years the oil industry will no longer be the resource upon which the whole world turns, and will instead be just another industrial input.
This current crises has been a boon for alternative energy sources.
Really has driven home the point to even the most 'head-in-sand-right-winger' that Solar is a National Defense issue, not a woke agenda.
If there's one thing you can do now that will set you up for the next 20–30 years: it’s learning Mandarin.
With advanced AI real time translation I don't see any need for that.
Completely real-time translation is an impossibility since languages have different sentence orders, so it will always be an awkward filter with fits and starts that erodes trust.
The US wields incredible negotiating power and hegemony because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Like the British pound and the Dutch guilder before it, if that loses reserve currency status it will be harder to borrow on favorable terms, which would affect the entire US economy. This is a big step in that perhaps starting to happen over the next few decades.
The yuan will never become a reserve currency as long as China maintain tight currency controls around importing and exporting it. It's very difficult to (legally) send CNY out or China. The euro is in a much better position to be adopted as an alternative, but its share of global reserves has been flat at around 20% for years. https://data.imf.org/en/news/imf%20data%20brief%20march%2027
The Euro is only 25 years old: it would be pure folly to make the "reserve currency" something that recent.
Then... One country of the eurozone already partially defaulted on its public debt (Greece, in 2015). And France is running an insane deficit: so bad that there are now talks of the International Monetary Fund taking control of France's public finances. France had to raise the yield on its debt to its highest level since nearly 20 years. France cannot reach the "only 5% of GDP" in yearly public deficit, on top of an already insane public debt: it is snowballing and the only outcomes are going to be miserable for the people (and for the EUR).
An economist, before the EUR began circulating, explained by which mechanisms the EUR would lead to Spain, Greece and then France default on their public debts. That economist explained how the EUR would lead to "too many secondary houses in Spain" and "too many public servants in France". When Greece did default on its debt, that economist said: "I was only wrong on the order on which these countries would default".
One would be crazy to make a reserve currency a currency that's a mix up of countries that have different productivity and different fiscal laws.
The EUR is one of the worst currency ever conceived and it could turn out to also be one of the shortest lived currency.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Losing the reserve currency doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happened to the British and Dutch because their empires were dismantled. So, yeah, it could happen to the US, slowly, over time (it already is). But nobody wakes up tomorrow and says they no longer want USD. Where are you parking the money, yuan?
> nobody wakes up tomorrow and says they no longer want USD Depends what happens tomorrow
Holding only Yuan isn't necessarily going to save you from what's coming.
I completely understand the growing need to reduce the US dollar dependency. But these drawdowns should happen in an orderly fashion, with due consideration to addressing issues inherent in the old global financial order.
Clearly, in hindsight, being completely dependent on a single currency was one of those issues. It would be folly to replicate that environment with a different currency.
Is it a yuan or is it a Renminbi?
it's actually "kuai" (pronounced same way as popular incorrect name of famous The Bridge on the River Kwai (the correct name is K(h)waE)) in Chinese streets, if you use yuan or renmimbi you will sound like you pretend to be some snobbish TV news host I don't think I've ever used anywhere in street, shop or restaurant yuan/renmimbi, at least not in Beijing and around, some people may use yuan, hardly anyone renmimbi h…
Reminbi ~= Pound Sterling
Yuan ~= Pound
Kuai ~= Quid