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A Peg for a Peg: That’s the West’s Offer for China

PornAddict

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A Peg for a Peg: That’s the West’s Offer for China

Tom Luongo

October 14, 2019

While President Trump keeps trying to support a stock market via noises about negotiations with China progressing well, things are spiraling out of control in Hong Kong.

The protests continue to escalate and show no signs of slowing down. The goal has explicitly become attacking the legitimacy of the Hong Kong government and bringing down an economy vulnerable to a falling property market.

The attack vector here is not directly political, Hong Kong is being attacked by the West via student proxies through its currency peg.

The Hong Kong dollar is tightly pegged to the US dollar and defending that peg by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority has left the city-state vulnerable to a massive property collapse if commerce continues to plummet as protestors keep targeting vital centers like the airport and hotel districts.

A collapse of the Hong Kong dollar peg, like all price floors/ceilings, is inevitable. Pegging one currency to another will always create an unsustainable imbalance of payments that the central bank can only cover for so long.

In Hong Kong’s case the peg has fueled, alongside China’s spectacular growth, a property market that is insanely over-valued. So, attacking the value of said property is how you attack the peg. The longer these protests go on, fueled and organized by outside elements (read US and British intelligence actors), the higher the probability that capital will flee Hong Kong and undermine the peg, creating a massive market dislocation overnight.

Think back to 2015 when the Swiss National Bank finally broke its peg to the euro after having turned itself into a hedge fund trying to stop the appreciation of the franc versus the euro. The bottom fell out of the euro/franc pair overnight, adjusting 30% in a matter of minutes.

When a major peg like that breaks, systems break. Societies break as well. Part of the pressure the West is applying to China is for open its capital account and submit to western control via hot money inflows. The Hong Kong dollar peg is the key weakness to the current arrangement.

It goes hand in hand with Trump’s moronic tariffs and the Treasury Department’s sanctions on Chinese firms doing business with Iran. It’s a multi-layered strategy.

Speaking of Iran…

Now that you have some idea of the stakes in Hong Kong, let’s talk about what’s happening in Saudi Arabia.

While Trump tries to pull his Middle East policy decisions from the brink of war, making deals with Turkey’s Erdogan and Russia’s Putin (through Erdogan) to unlock the stalemate in Syria, his allies in Riyadh and Tel Aviv are fuming and finally rightfully scared for their futures.

Iran and its proxies have gained the upper hand not only in Syria but in Yemen and the Persian Gulf. China is no longer playing games with Trump over buying Iranian oil, announcing that they are ready to invest up to $280 billion in Iran’s oil and gas industry.

The attacks on Saudi Armaco assets by the Houthis in Yemen have put Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman behind the eight ball and his only options are to sue for peace. The same can be said for Trump now that he’s been revealed for having half a brain and not willing to risk World War III over a drone and some oil tankers.

Speaking of oil tankers, the Saudis and/or the Israelis, who have the most to lose by Trump paying peacenik, are likely the ones responsible for the attack on the Iranian oil tanker in the Red Sea. If they can’t get the US to start the war, maybe they can goad the Iranians.

Not likely.

Trump and the embattled and likely out-of-power Benjamin Netanyahu tried vainly to frame the conflict with Iran solely about nuclear weapons. But it’s never been about that. It’s been about continuing the policy of chaos to blunt the rise of China and Russia as the new lords of Eurasia.

Nothing more, nothing less.

And destabilizing the region to split off Iran from Russia and China has failed completely. Iran was never going to back down. Putin told the world that North Korea would rather eat dirt than give up its nuclear weapons. Iran is in the same frame of mind. They would rather be annihilated than give the US an inch after seventy years of egregious intervention and starvation.

So, here we are. The Saudis are the weak link in the US’s Mideast Alliance. Hong Kong is China’s soft financial underbelly. It comes as no surprise to me to see classic color revolution behavior in Hong Kong spring up within weeks of a failed attempt to get Trump to start a war with Iran – when they shot down the US drone over its airspace.

Because once Trump refused to jump off the edge of the Abyss, everything that has happened since then has been predictable. Increased threats to Saudi assets, further instability of the world’s oil infrastructure against the backdrop of political paralysis in Israel.

Netanyahu went off the reservation making attacks on Iraqi Shi’ite militias and likely ginning up protests against an Iraqi government no longer a satrap of D.C. and Tel Aviv.

The end result is now the Saudi government is in very serious trouble. Oil prices cannot rally and will likely crash in the coming weeks as the global slowdown grips traders by the hind brain. At that point I will be shocked if the Houthis do not attack the Saudis again, this time more boldly.

What’s at stake in that attack is no different than that in Hong Kong, the peg of the Saudi Riyal to the US dollar. MbS cannot finance his country’s future without the Aramco IPO, which is now off the table until 2020 at the earliest. And he can’t fund his current spending at $55 oil.

Something has to give.

And that’s why the reporting on the Hong Kong protests have focused on the economic damage the city is experiencing.

It’s a simple bit of blackmail. A peg for a peg.

The Hong Kong dollar for the Saudi Riyal. China needs Hong Kong to return to normalcy. British banks do not want Hong Kong under Chinese control. So many of their traders are targets for extradition for questioning.

This was never about twenty-somethings twerking in a public park. This was about wresting control of the offshore yuan market from the British banks laundering money through Hong Kong to fund intelligence and military operations across Asia.

Saudi Arabia needs to survive to keep the petrodollar somewhat intact and the outflow of dollars continuing while Trump runs the biggest deficits the world has ever seen.

If the Saudis give up the peg, the dollar transmission system begins to collapse. Global trade is the base money of global economy. It is the source of the direction of the flow of capital, from there it is levered up in the shadow banking markets.

Did you ever wonder why the Fed had to switch on the lights at its overnight Repo window? Now it’s open permanently. And that’s most likely about troubles coming from Europe. Add Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia into that mix and we have a hot time in the old house.

Trump is okay with ending some parts of the US empire while maintaining other parts of it. But he’s been fighting for it to happen on his schedule, not Iran’s, not Russia’s and not China’s.

Time’s run out. And now the world is beginning to burn.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/10/14/peg-for-peg-thats-wests-offer-china/
 

wilbur

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An acquaintance who worked in the HK banking sector until recently, confirmed to me the facts above. The HK property sector is in a downfall, as banks and other corporations are leaving HK for Singapore; there is a lot of vacant space, and a downturn in the real-estate market. If the trend continues, it will affect the residential market also. It may prompt a mass exodus to places like Canada, as people will try to unload their massively overpriced condos before the price crashes; think of the 300,000 'Canadians' who live in HK. Many are Chinese-Canadians who returned to HK after getting their citizenship.

However, contrary to the opinion above, China does not need HK economically, as it represents now just under 3% of China's GDP, as opposed to 25% back in 1997. However, China will never allow HK to cede because of historical reasons. So HK may wind up driven to the ground but it will still remain a part of China.

The protesters are likely to precipitate the end of HK's special status well before 2047 if China has to intervene to restore order. The students protesting will quickly find out what they will have destroyed, when they come out of Chinese re-education camps signing the praises of President Xi and Chairman Mao.

I agree that the students are being manipulated with false hopes and promises by US and UK intelligence proxies. Think of the Kurds who were propped up by the US, as a tool to overthrow the Assad regime, now being left high and dry. They became US allies only because Assad refused to allow a pipeline from Saudi Arabia to Trukey and European markets, through Syria. Until Trump overruled the neocon policy establishment and pulled US forces out of Syria, they Kurds were carrying out US foreign policy by occupying Syria's oil producing regions and the territory where the pipeline was to be built. Now they are being unceremoniously dumped. The Kurds now are desperate, and have made a deal with the Assad regime for the Syrian Army to re-occupy former Kurdish areas of control, in order to prevent Turkey from wiping them out.

The US does not have any friends; they have interests. They are no longer 'interested' in the Kurds. Same will happen to HK students: the US will eventually lose 'interest' in HK students and their protests when their policy goals are reached, or they get 'interested' somewhere else.
 

Polaris

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A Peg for a Peg: That’s the West’s Offer for China

Tom Luongo

October 14, 2019
The USA and China are competing on several fronts.

The most important front is probably the least understood and widespread propaganda dominates.

The tech war will probably be more of a decisive factor in the future for influence and prosperity than other factors.

The news today was important. Britain was the last major country to make a decision on the 5G suppliers.

With Huawei, the ball is back inTrudeau's court. It never left.

What a F up this Meng Wanzhou affair has turned into. The entire world is racing ahead with 5G, trying to cement their own first mover advantage for their own country, trying to reap economic benefits from the implementation of this new technology.

And what do we do here?

In Canada, we watch a court case move through the legal system as slow as possible. It is like we worship lawyers in this country and not god.

______________________________________________________

Boris Johnson set to grant Huawei access to UK's 5G network: The Sunday Times

October 26, 2019 / 9:09 PM

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...ion-for-over-230-patents-source-idUSKCN1TD218
 
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