BRICS, USE THE DOLLAR, OR ELSE: TRUMP OVERREACH?
Just as with this past Monday's blog, so many people sent me this story that I have to talk about it. President-elect Trump has just released a statement on "X" threatening the BRICS countries with severe tariffs if they abandon the dollar:
Trump to BRICS: Do NOT abandon the dollar...
Now I am not a "free trade ideologue" nor a committed "Austrian school" economist for the simple reason that we're in the real world. In the world of the Austrian school, free trade would be wonderful, but when confronted with reality all it results in is - as the 1990s independent presidential candidate Ross Perot put it - the "great sucking sound" as non-protected industries abandoned the country for those where the regulatory climate was not as encumbering, and where the taxes and labor costs were lower. With that caveat on the record, I proceed by a torturously circuitous detour around Harvey's Barn to the observation, or rather the question, of just whom does Mr. Trump think he's kidding? I cannot remember the last time I bought anything that said "Made with Pride in India", or "Made in the Russian Federation", or "Product of South Africa". I might have, on various occasions, bought something agricultural from Brazil, but I don't recall. About the only things I buy from any of the BRICS members would be things involving technology of some sort, and when you say that, you say China.
In short, when I glance around le Chateau Farrell/das Farrellschloss, I do not see all that many products as having come from any of the BRICS countries, including my seldom-used televisions and DVD players, which came from Korea (the good Korea, not the bad one). My kitchen chairs came from - of all places - Vietnam as did my kitchen table. My refrigerator? Korea. My washer and drier came
from (believe it or not) Iowa. Most of my books came from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, with a few from Germany and, yes, a few from BRICS member India. Other than the few Chinese components in my technical gizmos, very little of what I own came from any of the BRICs countries.On and on I could go, but I suspect the reader gets the point: with the lion's share of trade between America and the BRICS nations being largely confined to China, I wonder if perhaps the threat to the BRICS nations in general to use dollars or else face the wrath of tariffs might not be a bit of an overreach on Mr. Trump's part.
Or to put a rather different point on it, Mr. Trump may not be readily appreciating why the BRICS bloc formed in the first place, but here's a hint: telling other sovereign countries that they cannot make their own currency arrangements between each other and threatening tariff mayhem might be fueling the very motives that led to the formation of the bloc. Telling more traditional societies and cultures such as India, or Brazil, or Russia, that they have to use the currency of a country that has a large segment of its own population that thinks it's ok to allow men to use women's toilets and play in women's sporting events, to allow children to undergo "gender surgery", and in general that wants to promote all sorts of cultural nincompoopery and codswallop (remember the American progressivist outrage when "Pussy Riot" was arrested for having unceremoniously staged a sacrilegious performance inside the rebuilt Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow, the one rebuilt after Stalin blew it up?) , probably should not be lecturing the BRICs countries on what they should and should not do amongst themselves before getting its own cultural house back into some sort of traditional order and sanity.
After all, it's the very abandonment of that order and the insistence that everyone else be exactly like us that led to the formation of the BRICS bloc in the first place. Other countries just became sick and tired of being bossed around.
If the President-elect does not appreciate the cultural and traditional component behind the BRICs alliance and remains focused only upon the materialistic, financial, and economic issues, then he will have gravely miscalculated the geopolitics of what he is up against. To be sure, the BRICs bloc is about finance and economics. But that is most decidedly not all that it is about. It is also about the wish of the traditional cultures that comprise it to preserve their culture in the face of the materialistic money myopia that has led to the spiritual and aesthetic decline of the West.
In short, don't expect Mssrs. Xi, Modi, or Putin to roll over on this one...
See you on th-
Oh, one more thing. I'm certain that the "progressivists'" outrage voiced in the USA over the arrest of Pussy Riot would have extended to the rebuilding of Christ the Saviour Cathedral itself, if had they known that Russia had the effrontery to rebuild something that Stalin blew up. Maybe it's things like that that ultimately are fueling the drive to abandon the dollar.
See you on the flip side...
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