Sunday, December 01, 2019
Standing Up To a Thug
Donald Trump's efforts to break Iran have suffered another setback.
It's called Instex, the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges. Think of it as a blockade runner that uses currencies other than the US dollar to circumvent Washington's trade sanctions against Tehran.
Originally set up by the UK, France and Germany, Instex has now been joined by Belgium, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Instex is the carrot to Donald Trump's stick. It presents the promise of regularizing trade provided Tehran first returns to compliance with the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Will it be enough to draw Iran back into the fold? No one knows.
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3 comments:
The manipulation and availability of currency/credit is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.
That the USA controls the world bank and the IMF says much about world problems.
I don't profess to be a financial expert but whilst the USA is currently sucking up most of the credit the world can produce to bolster its own economy in the form of never ending quantitative easing there is little else left to lift the economies of the less fortunate.
TB
I noted that this exchange has yet to process a transaction.
BRICS ?
The hegemony of US currency will end ... someday.
It's not a terrible idea. But the Americans' real weapon against Iran isn't Swift, it's extraterritorial application of US law and the entanglement of nearly all large companies with American banks. So, any company that does business with Iran, the US can steal any of their stuff in the US financial system and there's nothing they can do about it if they want to keep doing business with the US. Extraterritorial application of law like this is, under international law, illegal, but the Americans have never given a damn about that.
So the Europeans can fiddle around all they want, but until they get serious about saying things like "European businesses fined by the US will be indemnified and then tariffs will be levied to recover the cost", nobody's going to do business with Iran.
If I owned a big corp I'd totally spin off a "Sealed from the US" division whose job would be to take advantage of opportunities in places the US is sanctioning (Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, probably a few more--that's a chunk of change being left on the table) whose financial dealings would be designed explicitly to avoid US exposure, thus not giving them a handle for their blackmail.
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