The fact that this all happened by choice is really something.
It's like witnessing a self-decapitation.
It’s not a self decapitation exactly. I think Trump, his family, his corporate donors, and other friends are all willing to sacrifice everyone else - including the lead America had - to make themselves rich and powerful. Every single decision to spend - defense, ICE contracts, AI, approvals of anticompetitive acquisitions, changes to regulations, etc - is making that circle richer at our expense.
They don’t care if American supremacy is lost or if the dollar crashes or if the national debt becomes a crisis. As long as they have their wealth. The public is being decapitated, not them.
America just experienced a leveraged buy out.
Not really. It has more to do with gold is now worth almost 3x what it was 2 years ago.
And before you get too excited, this "news" from the World Gold Council. A consortium of gold mining corporations. Clearly it's a pump article "have you bought gold yet? everyone else is! why not you!?!?"
You're seeing the result of something that's been decades in the making. You can see a simple table of dollar reserves here. [1] They've been consistently falling year over year for the past 27 years. And it's not like 1999 was anything particular. Rather the uptake leading up to 1999 as a peak was a result of shenanigans that happened in 1971 [2]. That's when the USD became completely unbacked by anything, enabling the government to start going arbitrarily far into debt. That had short to mid-term positive impacts and long-term catastrophic ones, as is the typical strategy in modern times.
People always exaggerate the impact of geopolitical things, because it feels like the biggest thing ever, especially when you're relatively young. But in reality we're always onto nonsense after nonsense. Countries have the wisdom and view to appreciate this, and so respond to geopolitical stuff (in action, not rhetoric) far more gradually than people do. They're certainly not going to just dump all their dollar reserves because of a single misguided war or even misguided president, or they'd have been gone long ago.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_currency#Global_curren...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system#Nixon_sho...
[2] - https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/