KILLING SWIFT… SOFTLY
This has been a "geopolitical" week, and we round out what has thus far been a clown show, with Canada's Justin Turdeau being the clown in chief this week, closely followed by the clowns in the US Congress - McCarthy, McConnell - doubling down on more uniparty aid for the Ukraine in the latest "budget deal". But there's some more geopolitical bad news lurking, and I suspect that this article which was shared by many of you has a "hidden story" that will be the subject of today's high octane speculation. The story is simple: one of Russia's largest bank's chief executive officers, Andrei Kostin, is calling for an end to SWIFT (The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Transfer), the computerized financial clearing system for the vast amount of financial clearing in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and thoroughly under the thumb of the USA, with headquarters in Brussels (gee....just like the European Union. What a coincidence!):
Note carefully what this article says, because what it is saying is nothing new:
Russia should abandon the use of the Western-controlled global financial messaging system SWIFT, the head of Russia's second-largest bank has argued.
VTB CEO Andrey Kostin has been persistently calling for the increased use of domestic currencies by Russia and its trade partners, describing it as a sanctions-induced necessity.
“We need to kill SWIFT in our transactions, the issue is quite simple, but it will require certain actions, including within individual countries,” Kostin stated on Friday at the International Banking Forum in Sochi.
He noted that most of Russia’s payments are already made in national currencies, including in trade with China, Indonesia, India, as well as Arab and African states.
...
Earlier this month, Kostin told RT that the Global South should establish a new financial system based on national currencies in order to mitigate the risks posed by the West. He insisted that the dollar, and the entire Western financial system built around it, has been jeopardized by the sanctions on Russia. The banker noted, however, that the goal is not to fight the Western financial system but to build a parallel system that will work to the benefit of the Global South. (emphasis added)
Now, if you've been following Russia's years'-long responses to the west's finance-and-sanctions regime, these points in the article are nothing new; you'll recall that Shinzo Abe's Japan extended the use of its credit card clearing system to Russia during an earlier episode when Russia's access to the SWIFT system was curtailed. At that moment, Russia also announced it was kicking Visa-Mastercard's clearing operations out of Russia, and implementing its own card system. All of these things were done.
Then the next chapter in this story was, as the article alludes to, the negotiation of bi-lateral currency clearing agreements between the various BRICS nations agreeing to settle international trade between them in their own currencies, by-passing the dollar. As an aside, do not forget to include that Indo-Japanese logistical support agreement of a couple of years ago, which in my opinion probably includes a secret protocol to agree to clear any such support in yen and rupees, bypassing the dollar once again.
More recently we've seen the talk from BRICS nations about their own version of a gold-backed currency.
So, if there is really nothing new in this article - after all, we've heard such things before from various components of the Russian government or financial sector, then what is going on?
I rather strongly suspect, and herewith the high octane speculation of the day, that these pronouncements must be read and interpreted in the light of the context I have just outlined. When one does so, I suspect strongly that it means two things, both huge with financial and geopolitical implications if true, and that both of these things will eventually become public knowledge. Kostin's pronouncements, taken within the wider context of the developments outlined above, imply that firstly Russia has built out the scaffolding of international financial clearing free of SWIFT, and like SWIFT, this system may by in part space-based, in part cable-based, and likely involves some combination of Russia's own card system and the Japanese system offered by Shinzo Abe some years ago. If that suspicion be true, then the shockwaves will eventually be felt. Even without Japan, however, I suspect that Russia has been partially successful in building and testing this system internationally. It's that international testing that brings me to my second point of the speculation: the international testing has consisted precisely in the electronic clearing of transactions in those bi-lateral currency agreements of the BRICS nations. This in turn strongly implies that there may already be an agree-upon unit of account being used to clear those transactions, and it is not the dollar.
Why not announce all this publicly? Because it would be too much of a shock to the global system, or to put it in the telltale statement 0f the article, the statement that indeed makes me think all these things are true: "...the goal is not to fight the western financial system but to build a parallel system..." In order to work, that system would, by the nature of the case, work much more efficiently with a unit of account built into the algorithms of the clearing system itself... We're in effect, in Venice, dealing with banks on the Rialto, trading directly from one currency to another, and bypassing Florentine ducats altogether. How did Venice do it? Units of account...
... or to put it in the simplest terms: if this speculation be true, then Russia is one clearing center of this system, and everyone is using its units of account...
Time will tell, of course, but at least with this speculative template in mind, we know what to watch for...
See you on the flip side...
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Swift to quote Hans Christian Anderson The Emperor New Clothes is NAKED.
Maybe we’re at, or nearing, another “Christopher Columbus moment” — that is, the revelation to the general public of something “new” that, in reality, has been in existence and in use for a while already.
In any case, getting out of SWIFT can’t be all that difficult in today’s geopolitical context, where besides the U.S., there are big countries with big guns and their own currencies, plus plenty of their own gold and natural resources. If the Venetians could pull it off with quill pens and ink, then Russia et al. could do it today.
“Unit of account” is a casino chip, that has no validity outside the casino, whereas “unit of exchange” is money, that can be used, to purchase groceries, and the mismatch occurs, when ordinary money is seen, as casino chips.
Such a mismatch would fundamentally change a society – into a gambling hall – and any country’s economy would become a mobster-controlled Las Vegas, which is how all empires are made, by conjurers of gambling magic.
The takeaway, from the biblical narrative, is the debt-cancelling, that took place, at every seven years interval, which uprooted the devilish weed of unsocial gambling, and prevented the hoarding of riches, by debt enslavement.
The fiat dollar, taken off the gold standard, and the petrodollar, attached to oil and opium, have become the global casino chip, and Russia is simply returning to agrarian values, which is a simple datcha life, in hobbit philosophy.
Lao Tzu, and Sun Tzu, are the same, and the former flows, in an empty river, and the latter flows, in a timely noodle chop – Genghis Khan style.
7 Faces of Dr. Lao:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/scl/fi/yj4i83ygni8r3c4v783yg/seven-faces-of-dr-lao.mp4?rlkey=dpzbes479oa0nkxknlz196c6n
No. I think that’s incorrect.
Unit of Account is key.
Take the Constitutionally defined dollar; the silver dollar. The silver dollar is money because it is silver. It is also currency due to its hardness. A silver dollar is superior to a silver eagle, as a currency. It’s the copper alloy vs bullion, although both are money (the word for money and silver is the same in many languages).
Yet there is another feature to a silver dollar and that’s the defined weight; 371.25 grains of pure silver, or 0.7734 troy ounces of silver. THIS is a unit-of-account.
(and essentially a piece of eight, eight silver reales)
A silver dollar, a silver eagle, a hundred ounce bar, a thousand ounce ingot – all are money. It’s the dollar, a real dollar, that is a unit-of-account.
The world doesn’t need a reserve currency. The world needs reserves, and a unit-of-account. The Fiat Reserve Dollar simply became the world’s counterfeit unit-of-account.
The unit-of-account that Russia may introduce, the one to which Dr. Farrell is referring (I think), is gold grams (potentially pegged to rubles). Perhaps silver grams become a universal unit-of-account as well, allowing for a bi-metalic monetary system to value against each other (in fixed ratio or fluctuating free market arbitrage).
Nice one Ana.
American global dominance and inner recklessness is very slowly coming to an end, and when ordinary Joe awakes, he’ll believe it’s 1861.
The writer’s strike is ending; yet we’re still getting amateur, if not elementary schooled scripts.
You would think a politician would be hedging his future; instead of purposely destroying his country, and his looney career.
Ironically SWIFT had the Russians in its crosshairs, not so very long ago.
But, due to the, not-so-copyrighted Looney Tune’s Western leadership; it has had the opposite effect on the intended results. Of course, one could say that it was the puppet masters intentions, as their sock puppets have…? Well, sock puppet IQ’s, in the single digits. As advanced in this newly digitized political landscape, as their single digits IQ’s permit.
A consequence of picking an enemy that has the capacity to fight back, and sting it’s opponent.
Not only killing the USSA exorbitant privilege[reserve currency]; putting up The Ukraine Laundromat, disguised as a proxy fighter; a Planscamdemic to destroy small businesses and slowly kill off the population; the list goes on, in a tragedy as farce script – all too real; to believe anyone, with any common sense, wrote the damn thing. A true Looney Tune elementary schooled, wannabe-script; for a circus of Western sock-puppet clowns[aka world leaders]; a population that must be dumbed-down, or unsensitized to political consequence; and too numerous other infamous factors, to dwell in; without going insane in this asylum led, culture killing field.
Is the Big Bad West going to be able to blow this newly realized BRICS House down?
Russia is using the Venice unit of account playbook.
One wonders; if this wasn’t mapped out when the UFO’s started making itself known.
Building-out redundancy within the system.
Preparing for interstellar warfare?
Why Planet Earth and the Sun are being weaponized.
Yet, concurrently – the systems are being compromised – from within?
A breach – from another dimension?
I don’t know about you, Horatio,
but things are beginning to cut too close to the bone,
for my rich plasma stardust.