I can't tell you how many articles I have seen in the last year claiming the dollar CAN'T loose the reserve currency status - and then to prove it must stay that way because its the reserve now and list a bunch of metrics on how the dollar is dominant - then they suggest there is no viable alternative for international trade - as if it were IMPOSSIBLE to provide one- ever. This is usually followed by the argument that the US Dollar "sucks the least" of all of the currently available fiats.
SO that is your Bar - establishing the mechanisms for international trade and sucking the least. Back your bank just 1% with something that isn't a printing press ( gold, silver, oil) and you already suck the least.
Witness the new BRICS bank
Initial capital for the BRICS Bank will be $50 Billion - paid in equal share among the 5 members (with a contingent reserve up to $100 Billion) and will see India as the first President. The BRICS Bank will be based in Shanghai and chaired by Russia. Simply put, as Sovereign Man's Simon Black warns, "when you see this happen, you’ll know it’s game over for the dollar.... I give it 2-3 years."
You don't say...
Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa working together on a joint international bank to serve as an alternative to the Western controlled and Dollar Centric IMF. Together they account for about 20% of wolrd GDP compared to the United States at 22% ( if any GDP number is to be believed)
Yes the US Dollar is the most commonly held reserve currency, but when its held as reserve that doesn't mean its being USED in international trade - in fact we have been running trade deficits based on the fact that the dollars don't come home and become part of these reserves-- but at what point do countries accept dollars into reserves because they have no choice - no one wants them ( but the US) and too much too fast crashes the value? How many dark trades occur and how much of the reported reserve numbers are lies? ( My guess? The Reserve numbers are about as reliable as the number reported for Fort Knox gold deposits)
The shift is happening, and if OPEC starts trading directly with the BRICs for energy, this game is over. Those reserve dollars find their way home - maybe not all at once - as each player spending them slowly to get maximum gain ( unlike those single put 1.6 Billion dollar Gold sells on Monday morning at US Open) but the dollars will come home. No one else wants or needs them anymore - and given 70% of all of the US Dollar that exist, exist in accounts overseas, it will flood us and inflation will ramp, and ramp and ramp. We are coming to the end folks. 2-10 years before the US is fully a 3rd world nation.
Good analysis Weisshaupt, and I agree, the timing of the end could be up for debate because there is just so much that is intertwinned, interdependent and volatile...but the more a group like this can sever connections safely without setting another tripwire off and eventually isolate the US and the EU and insulate themselves the more rapid the balance of economic power will shift...but those intertwinned, interdependent volatile variables can get out of hand and I have no faith in any one or group of mortals who think they can control them all...this economic war could just as easily spin off into another World War in a heartbeat...
The PTBs here and across the pond forget that the dollar knocked off the pound, which knocked off the real, which knocked off the gulden...
Well here,
check out the history for yourself.
Point is, EVERYTHING ends. Any construct by man is almost hard-wired to end at some point, like nature, there is always something, bigger, better, badder, cooler...whatever...
And history also shows us many times how economic war can lead to real shooting wars and one or the other or both can change societies, systems, borders...everything.
There is one posssibility the US survives this...it still means the end of the US as we know it now and as we once knew it...it means adopting the Russian template, prop your nation up by being the preeminent provider of sin and vice - sell arms, nuclear technology, drugs, hookers, whatever you have to..and be controlled by an oligarchy comprised of statist pols, crony capitalists and crime lords...
I say throwing all the trash out at the most opportune time, retaining (somehow) a credible nuclear deterent and isolating ourselves from the rest of the world and relearning to be self sufficient as a people, as families, as communites and a whatever "nation" construct might mean is the better way to go...
ETA - And on the general theme of
this sh*t cannot and will not go on much longer...
Market rigging explained, well, mostly...it can be hard to follow the technical aspects, but basically HFTs are used to swindle people...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-15/market-rigging-explained...and there is a direct correllation between this theft and the next link, as the PTBs know their time is running short and they are sqweezing whatever they can wherever they can however they can!
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-15/why-status-quo-unsustainable-interest-and-debt-what-yellen-wont-tell-youAnd this last chart really should illustrate for everyone just how unsustainable and vulnerable these masters of the universe have made things!
Tick...tock...tick...t.............................