SELLING OFF THE NATION TO
COVER TRADE LOSSES
In “Around the World in Eighty Days,” David Niven fueled the boat by breaking it up for firewood to feed the engine's boiler and keep it going in his race. Today we're breaking off pieces of the country - - selling off our corporations in great numbers in order to keep our "trade imbalance economy" going forward.
Trillions in trade deficit dollars we've thrown away outside our borders - - money we did not require to come back to us for our goods and services (which is what "trade" is supposed to be) - - are seeking to exchange themselves for something. They have discovered our corporations on the stock exchanges and in private deals.
This sale of our country to fund our past and present ruinous trade losses has reached a crisis level, as shown on www.economyincrisis.org.
As for trade, this nation is not "trading" in the traditional and accepted sense - - which term implies an approximate balance - - but handing out $600-$800 billion per year (about $2 billion per day, weekends included) to suppliers outside our borders, in excess of what they buy from us.
Any kid who trades frogs and baseball cards knows he has to have "reciprocal trade" or he will go broke. We aren’t “trading,” we’re bleeding to financial death.
"Free Trade" doesn’t mean financial destruction of one side, but a near-even-steven type of swapping which leaves in its beneficial wake profits and jobs, transportation work and so on.
Our main export today is money
Foreigners export to us goods and services. We export to them money.
Our ratio of exports to imports is about $1 of exports to $5 of imports. Over years. Over decades. This is madness, and few seem to realize it.
The huge ships full of containers unloading in our West Coast ports return to their ports with the containers empty. Reciprocal or balanced trade has been forgotten.
How can we keep dumping $600-$800 billion a year “trade deficit” money with no strings attached? We can’t.
They manufacture goods and provide services. We manufacture money - - and this overproduction of bucks has watered our dollar, causing it to fall. Worse, this system of paying bills by "printing" money (we don't overprint paper money today as in Germany's Weimar republic or as in Brazil's not-so-distant past - - instead, today's "money" is electronic and produced by pushing buttons and changing bank rules about lending, and other such means; however, overproduction of money is overproduction of money, and has inflation built in.
Many trillions of dollars pumped out by us in insane, money-losing "trading" since about 1980 now reside in central banks of the world and also in other parts of world economies. And the sums have been growing by two-thirds of a trillion dollars a year for the last several years.
And we call their "success" a "miracle" - - but it's our stupidity
What nations or blocs couldn't succeed if we pump in hundreds of billions of dollars a year, year after year?
Their stash now loses value as the buck drops - - what should they do?
Trillions sit and lose value. They cannot be turned in - - our dollar hasn't had any hard-money value for many decades. They can use some of their bucks to buy gold (which has gone from $200 to $900 at this writing) or silver or real estate outside our borders, but sellers are more and more reluctant to take dollars, and have no way to unload those dollars.
But the substantial holders can buy or control our corporations through purchasing shares of stock on our exchanges - - or make private purchases. They've been doing this QUIETLY. If the nation wakes up, the "door might be closed" in some way. Those who are unloading dollars have to do as much of it as possible before the alarm sounds.
(Where China not long ago tried to openly buy a substantial US oil company, such a cry was raised that the Chinese backed off. Yet the sum involved - - only a few billion - - was less than a month's bleeding of our $200 billion annual trade loss with China! In all the discussion, that point wasn't brought out. When the Chinese backed down, "we" sighed from relief - - the "crisis" was past!
But as economyincrisis. org brings out with precision, the STEALTH PURCHASING OF OUR COMPANIES IS FAR, FAR GREATER than this one incident that so alarmed us.
We should be super-alarmed.
We’re gettin’ “took.”
And there's trillions more out there seeking some exchange for their otherwise worthless electronic and paper holdings.
Absurd to borrow the money back
One way foreigners have been utilizing their huge stashes of our throwaway dollars is to lend them back to us to help fuel our continuing foolishness.
Highly-placed officials argue that we need to borrow the money back so that we can have enough money to continue our imbalanced trading.
They argue that this is true recycling of the dollars - - just like selling our goods and services to get the dollars back! That's confusion compounded! It's not our money, we have to pay it back, and we have to pay interest on it in the meantime!
But we borrow back plenty of our throwaway trade dollars. And we HIDE this borrowing. We reveal our "budget deficits" in terms of MONEY LOST or converted to bonded debt. However, we CONCEAL (from the public, anyhow) financial debt incurred in "trade," which debt is some $750 billion annually, in contrast to only half that amount in budget deficits. (The public thinks "trade deficit" is tomatoes or computers, not money, and certainly not money charged to it.)
It's called "foreign debt," or "external debt," and by such terms as those, however, it's ALL CHARGED TO YOU, BABY. It's all bonded debt against the full faith and credit of the people of the United States.
And they don't know it. If they learned it, the screams would be heard not just worldwide but out to Saturn.
Why doesn't our dollar crash instead of glide down as at present?
Foreigners hold so many trillions of dollars - - especially the giant amounts in their central bank "currency reserves" that they can't take the hit. A 50% drop means they lose trillions. The decline in the past three years has cost them dearly already. So they prop up the buck while seeking to unload them somehow. The new opportunity is to exchange dollars for US corporations.
Buying our means of production
The dollars we wasted are buying up our means of production of anything and everything.
The bucks should have come back from the start for our goods and services - - but now come for our means of providing those goods and services.
Many are now reluctant to accept dollars
In the case of oil, some want five - - even ten or fifteen - - times the number of dollars as before.
Oil at $11 three years ago is way over $100 at this writing.
We're seeing foreign settlements once happy in dollars moving towards a mixture of currencies - - euros and dollars, yen and dollars, or a "basket" of currencies. The dollar is being phased out but slowly.
Please note - - our so-called "trading partners" don't have trade losses
You will notice that not one of our so-called "partners" has a net deficit overall - - certainly not with the US! All are on the gravy train, somewhat astonished and wondering when we are going to wake up. If they have any negative trade balance or loss, it's brief, small, and quickly adjusted.
Then why do we and our leaders not see this? Sad to say, our world corporations are in favor of our sending trillions out where they can make money shipping cheap goods to the bottomless US market. These transnationals encourage trillions to be borrowed against the US public.
(US exporters fear that any steps taken to rectify the ongoing disaster will mean that foreign markets will close or be limited. But the bullet has to be bitten. Will "trade wars" erupt, as scare-talk claims? Friends, the trade war has been going on for 30 years, and we have LOST. Oddly, the exporters are the only ones benefiting from the falling dollar, and that's good for that sector. However, the nation as a whole, and the entire economy as a whole, and the system of ruinous imbalanced trade as a component of the American way of life, is not benefiting, but being hurt, even badly.)
(We need to stop funding the huge losses through borrowing. We need balanced trade agreements, the good old "reciprocal trade agreements"
- - we buy about $50 billion from you, you buy about $50 billion from us, and then we'll do another deal. We don't need "tariffs," although the world's GATT - - General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade - - is reputed to have 22,000 pages of them. The US relates the words, "free trade," to the ideal of freedom itself, but trade is down-to-earth, commercial and practical. We have been skinned, and the skinning is ongoing.)
"Trading partners" is a term that implies some sort of equality in the business arrangement. We’re trading idiots, and have allowed our "partners" to be trading robbers.
Pardon me, folks, but we’re idiots.
And the bucks are coming home to roost - - to own as much of the country as possible before the door slams in outrage at the whole ruinous so-called US "trade" concept of bleeding uncontrollably.
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© 2008 Karl Roebling. All rights reserved.
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