David Brinton - Comments

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Vladimir Putin Proposes "Eurasian" Currency Union
9 years ago

> Putin just want to to put the US dollar out of the market.

Well, someone who actually gets it.

> But he will fail and will always fail.

If it were only Putin, I'd agree, but he's far from alone.

> The USA can easily get even or punish Russia thru SWIFT.

SWIFT is independent. It's true there have been cases where SWIFT has complied with requests for exclusion, such as with Iran, but those are few and far between. At the height of the Ukrainian crisis the U.S. implied they may request a SWIFT exclusion against Russia.

Putin's response was to remind the West that Russia is a nuclear power and if pushed against a wall will not be so nice. The West buckled and settled for relatively weak sanctions that ended up hurting western businesses more than Russia. Ultimately, Putin won Ukraine, and as soon as the media has something more interesting to focus on, the sanctions will quietly be lifted.

The bigger bugaboo for a lot of nations is that the dollar is the world's reserve currency. On the one hand, that forces adversaries to help prop up the U.S. economy. On the other, it gives the U.S. the ability to dramatically affect other nations economies in either a positive or negative fashion. However, the BRIC nation's drive to end the hegemony of the U.S. dollar is being led by China, not Russia.

Can Putin Survive?
9 years ago

What a silly article, full of wishful thinking. Putin is stronger today than ever. He has a huge popularity rating with his people, and that after 14 years in office. Let's see any American politician in office for 14 years come up with similarly high public opinion polls.

The West and especially the U.S. is so full of desire for what they want, they have no ability to recognize reality on the ground. All this talk of a coup to dispose of Putin is as absurd as imagining that Russia didn't come out the clear and obvious winner in Ukraine.

The western sanctions hurt Russian and Putin less than the Russian sanctions hurt Europe. Just take a look at Germany's economy since sanctions began. The only reason there is any issue, at the moment, for the Russian economy is the low price of oil. That's a very very temporary problem that will resolve itself in the near future to Russia's benefit, bearing in mind that Russia is pumping more oil than ever and gaining market share from others every month. When prices rise again, and there is no question they will, Russia is going to be sitting very pretty.

And let's not pretend the price of oil hasn't hurt others. Saudi Arabia, who instigated the problem in return for the U.S. putting boots on the ground against ISIS, is begging for non-OPEC countries (Russia) to work out some sort of a deal to bring prices back up.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is building oil storage tanks as fast as they can to store the un-needed oil being produced by the shale oil industry in the hope it industry won't go bust before prices rise.

Oil prices are a ticking time bomb and Russia happens to have the longest fuse of any nation. So, forget about the economy driving Putin from office. Once again, he's going to come out on top to the humiliation of the West.

Instead of writing countless articles about how Putin is going to be overthrown, these silly experts should pay attention to the precipice the U.S. is sitting on. They have an Israeli Prime Minister who has just announce that there is no way he'll ever agree to a Palestinian State. They have boots on the ground in Iraq, fighting ISIS alongside Iranian Shi'ite forces. Meanwhile, they're managing a coalition of Sunni Monarchs to bomb Shi'ite freedom fighters in Yemen.

The U.S. economy is in a dismal state with the Federal Reserve holding trillions of dollars in funny money they must soon get off their books. The entire economy is on the verge of collapse and the U.S. Congress is being remote controlled by Israel, forcing them to vote against the wishes of the people of the United States. The nation could fall into a state of civil war at any time.

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