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Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

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Re: Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

#391

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 US wields incredible negotiating power period. In way too many fields.

It worked when the country wanted to be a globalist force and lead by example (albeit it was partially pretending to set an example, US exceptionalism is ingrained in US culture and politics).

It doesn't work in an anti-globalist world, especially one in which allies are bullied.

Re: Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

#392
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, how much of the extracted oil becomes ICE fuel? Because other transports cannot be converted that quick (air, sea...) and most if not all petrochemical industries will still need to exist even if all cars drive electric. So how big will be the effect of crashing fuel demand?

25% of oil production is for cars 16% for trucks and buses 7% for aviation 4% for shipping 2% for rail and domestic waterways 25% + a chunk of the 16% (city buses, shorter distance or smaller trucks, etc) is a good amount. https://www.statista.com/statistics/307194/top-oil-consuming...

About 6% is for plastics. That isn't going away anytime soon, but it also doesn't release much carbon, it's mostly just changing form from liquid to solid.

Re: Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

#394
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In some countries it's well over 50%. China of course being one of them As always with these stats, I like to check whether that includes plug in hybrids, and it does. Those are still mostly dependent on fossil fuels, although they use less. Pure BEV adoption seems to depend on your radius from Norway: https://www.autonergy.co/blog/global-ev-adoption-leaderboard... (France should really be doing better, after all m…

Those numbers are from before Mr Trump decided to do his very best to convince the world to stop using oil. Which happened to coincide beautifully with VW group, Stellantis and Chinese firms having an all out price war on smaller EVs, which have until now been the underserved segment of the market. In Denmark it’s certainly not 36%, its probably closer to 90% of new cars being EVs, it’s simply financial suicide to bu…

> it’s simply financial suicide to buy a new ICE car here

That's a result of tax policy much more than the fundamental economics of ICE vs EV. Petrol is highly taxed. ICE cars are highly taxed. EV cars are probably exempted, or at least taxed less.

Re: Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

#395
post #297

Of course it's Deutsche Bank, I am sure nothing shady will come of that.

Right. The favorite bank of Epstein's cash account will surely keep its integrity /s - https://fortune.com/2025/10/08/deutsche-bank-and-jeffrey-eps... - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

[deleted]

Re: Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

#396

I wonder if it has anything to do with the currency apparently being backed by an immense reserve of oil (proven to the world by this year's geopolitical events), then coal, and then a massive amount of renewable solar, hydro, wind kWh's and infrastructure to deliver it to homes and shops. More and more it feels like a nation's kWh throughput is the new metric to track its global influence in manufacturing, industry,…

I've always sort-of-joked[1] about a "Blood Standard": your status as reserve currency is proportional to the percentage of the world population your nation can murder in 12 months. Puts a hard floor on nations with strategic nuclear deterrents - they can never fall below a fairly high threshold, no matter how much of a "Security State Zombie" their national economies have become. [1] I'm not 100% sure it's all me jo…

I mean, Russia's currency is in the toilet, and if even just 10% of their nukes are actually functional they probably kill a significant percentage of the world pop.

Re: Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

#397
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious counterexample would be the previous most powerful empire in the world (ie the UK) ceding that title to the USA after collapsing after WW2? No war between the UK and the US was needed.

The UK was a declining power that had been absolutely gutted by war and owed huge debts to the US that it had accrued to fund the war. I believe Thucydides Trap is more about the situation we have now with the US and China where both are moving from strength to strength.

“The mantle of command”, a FDR biography, goes into some detail on this point. Good read.

Re: Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

#398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saudi Arabia needs oil prices at ~$86.60/barrel to balance their budget, per Bloomberg. It is not the marginal cost to pump a barrel, but what a country needs to support their sticky spending from previously assured energy exports. Governments will collapse long before we approach low single digit oil prices on the global market. The World Is Awash With Oil and Prices Are Poised to Keep Falling - https://www.bloomber…

But China is already in decline before reaching this ascendancy. I think new models will result in new structures, not just a switch from the US to China.

Sure. What difference does it make if they're 1.2b or 800m? It's still huge by any metric. The current US administration is definitely clearly working in their favour. That's part of why Detusche Bank is a yuan clearing house now.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-thucydides

Re: Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saudi Arabia needs oil prices at ~$86.60/barrel to balance their budget, per Bloomberg. It is not the marginal cost to pump a barrel, but what a country needs to support their sticky spending from previously assured energy exports. Governments will collapse long before we approach low single digit oil prices on the global market. The World Is Awash With Oil and Prices Are Poised to Keep Falling - https://www.bloomber…

Indeed. Electricity will be the only abstraction layer of energy, all end uses (transportation, cooking, heating, cooling, appliances) will switch to electricity. Electricity can be generated from any source (dirty + clean), but the abstraction layer of electricity will allow the grid to continuously increase the clean fuels. It helps that the cleanest is also the cheapest. Solar panels are cheap as dirt. In 1975, a…

You are assuming that carbon negative countries are all electrostates. That's not true at all. Buthan and Panama which are carbon negative are very far from being electrostates. Costa Rica is not even carbon negative nor an electrostate. Carbon negative countries and Costa Rica due to their low GDP are very far behind on electrification.

Just look up the percentage of new car sales that are electric on each of those countries. It's around 5%. The reason? They cost 35,000 dollars at the low end even for a Chinese SUV whereas the average new car uses gasoline and costs 16,000 dollars for a Chinese SUV.

according to these countries' censuses, Cooking with electricity and drying clothes in a clothes dryer are rather rare too, around 10% or lower. although clothes dryers are more common in apartment buildings, apartments are only around 10% of all houses. Most people cook with small government subsidized 25 pound LPG tanks. Water heaters are used by 5% of the population because the water is actually desirable cold and not hot because the air is hot instead of cold and there is no winter.

They are carbon negative because their population is small enough to have most of the country still covered in virgin jungles and forests. They are big enough to offset the carbon emissions of their small populations. The ratio of forest to population works out to make the country carbon negative.

Also due to low GDP, they don't consume much energy and houses are small. For example most people don't run AC most the time unlike the US or don't have AC at all. Houses are usually 50 to 100 square meters. Electric service is 120 amps at 120 volts split phase. That's just 14 kilowatts. Running AC even for 8 hours a day can cost half the average monthly wage.

Everything is within walking distance and highly centralized in cities. Even suburbs are high density with almost no outdoor space.

Re: Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

#400
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US Military has been a paper tiger in reality for quite some time. The problem is that Trump decided to demonstrate this in practice. It is becoming obvious for gulf countries that US military protection is worth nothing.

The US military may be ossifying into a paper tiger, but I'd say Iran mainly shows Trump is a coward and an idiot. From what I hear, what Trump did with Iran was burn through the US stockpile of certain fancy special-purpose wepons you're really only meant to use to punch a hole for your conventional forces to enter by. Trump is not willing to send in those conventional forces, because many of those personel will die…

We could take on Iran with Russia, China, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and all the other Stan’s being the supply lines some what similar to Vietnam with six additional countries added, with the Iranians who appear to have the willingness to fight to the end.

How does it work long-term for the USA? In time the United States would have to build up to half a million men on the ground. The United States at its peak in Vietnam for example had over half a million men on the ground.

The biggest reason the Ukrainians are holding their own first and foremost is they are willing to fight, second is the supply lines. Vietnam won because they were willing to fight and they had China and Russia as their supply lines.

Afghanistan against the Russians, and Afghanistan against America was the same. The Afghans were willing to fight as long as they had material coming in from the USA and the same was true when they were getting all their supplies from the Chinese, Pakistan, when they were fighting us.

Supplies are important, but what’s more important is whether or not a group of people have the heart to fight to the end no matter what.

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