The Federal Reserve is the central bank of the United States of America. It issues the U.S. dollar, which happens to be the world reserve currency. The Federal Reserve is the most powerful institution in the world today, arguably the most powerful ever: this is because it has total and absolute control to determine value …
Chile, Philippines, and Iran
In this series we will examine America’s numerous overseas interventions.
The lamentations of a returning expat.
The World Bank and the IMF (International Monetary Fund) were founded at the Bretton Woods conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944. These multilateral institutions wield tremendous power and influence across the world today.
How the Nixon shock changed the world forever
How the creation of the fiat dollar changed the world forever
In Rumsfeld’s words, the unknown became known on the morning of September 11th 2001 when terrorists attacked both the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia. The 9/11 attacks were in response to America’s ongoing meddling and interference in the Middle East. The symbolic nature of the attacks should not be missed either: bin Laden chose to attack centres of U.S. economic power and its intelligence apparatus. 9/11 was an attack on the dollar: bin Laden understood very well that the dollar was, and still is, the centre of gravity of the American empire. By attacking the dollar, he wanted to accelerate a run on the U.S. dollar which would have led to foreign investors divesting themselves of their dollar holdings and transferring them to other currencies. A collapse of the dollar would have meant that its status as the world’s reserve currency would have come to end meaning that, in effect, the U.S. could no longer maintain its vast military presence overseas, grant protection to the Saudi royal family indefinitely and providing subsidies to Israel, to say nothing of the massive structural imbalances in the U.S. economy that would need to be addressed if reserve currency status was lost.
The petrodollar wars – U.S. foreign policy and the dollar system
The mass reindustrialization and suburbanization of the United States in the post-war era, along with an American-centred global economy, allowed Americans to live an affluent lifestyle far beyond anything that had come before it. On the surface, the Bretton Woods system was generally working well as member states adhered to the arrangements and the economies …