John, these requests seem reasonable and justified on the surface. Is there another way of looking at it?
Also, I used to think both Trump and Putin were petty tyrants. Trump showed otherwise, for the most part. I'm thinking Putin might actually not be as bad as we're shown in our delightful media. How much of this statement would you agree with?
John is incapable of rationally looking at Russia and "Putin", as we have shown. The words come up and he just lashes out like a demented old Joe Biden in a sundowning episode. It's quite sad. I'm pretty sure the way that BP and I write is clearly high level to others, whether they agree with it or not. He would have you believe all we write is "mishmash", gobbledy gook, and all these other 2nd grade words a child would employ, or Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass.
I like a lot of John's ideas. I give him credit when he is cogent, right, and he is quite frequently. But not so infrequently he comes off as a sundowning Joe Biden, it's rather embarrassing.
He would have you believe all we write is "mishmash", gobbledy gook, and all these other 2nd grade words a child would employ, or Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass.
This is the first link. This stuff is funny! For those who have a sense of humor. Love those lady physicians!
Originally posted by Cool Breeze: I say these things because also looking back it was obvious in the last 20 years no one really cared that you were a "doctor." They certainly didn't act like you had a future to be one or were a "made man" until you actually make the big loot. Women, in a sense, are what I'm referring to. Of course, you can get 30+ year old women since their stock is falling but even with loot or your reputable/high earning future, 20s women didn't care.
Posted by Anne in response: Lol. I hate to break it to you but if no women that met your standards were interested in you it wasn’t because of your career choice.
John is incapable of rationally looking at Russia and "Putin", as we have shown. The words come up and he just lashes out like a demented old Joe Biden in a sundowning episode. It's quite sad. I'm pretty sure the way that BP and I write is clearly high level to others, whether they agree with it or not. He would have you believe all we write is "mishmash", gobbledy gook, and all these other 2nd grade words a child would employ, or Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass.
I like a lot of John's ideas. I give him credit when he is cogent, right, and he is quite frequently. But not so infrequently he comes off as a sundowning Joe Biden, it's rather embarrassing.
I can tell that FullMoon recognizes this.
This is pure flimflam. I see nothing productive whatsoever.
Create a handle and tell me why something 7% of GDP is THE issue that destroys the US if it loses it. I'll be waiting. Or better yet, tell Martin Armstrong who debunked this long ago, as well. I'm sure you know more than both he and I, though apparently you can't tell me why something so small could be the linchpin issue, so you haven't.
Call me crazy, but I believe the other 93% of whatever you want to label it is more important than some internet meme meant to scare people or make things simple to understand in their minds. As I've said, the petrodollar is just a SMALL proxy of overall US economic and military hegemony. Of course when it goes away, it goes away with all of their other powers that the US had, but that means nothing as far as it being any more important than economic history, technology, military power, diplomatic pressure, defense, etc.
Actually, there is an existential threat coming out of the Middle East. It's called the petrodollar agreement. That goes, and our economy instantly collapses like a house of cards.
That's why we're getting involved in the Middle East so much. It's all about protecting Saudi Arabia and advancing its geopolitical interests. If we don't do that, we risk an economic disaster worse than the Great Depression.
Saudi Arabia is probably the only country whose clout over our economy rivals that of China's. In fact, it may even surpass China's.
"Petrodollar" has been used to refer to different things, but the "petrodollar agreement" which DaKardii refers to here means only one thing. It was the agreement brokered by William Simon in 1974 where the Saudis agreed to recycle their dollars into US government bonds, and that kept the dollar system afloat.
The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret
How a legendary bond trader from Salomon Brothers brokered a do-or-die deal that reshaped U.S.-Saudi relations for generations.
May 30, 2016, 6:00 PM CDT
Failure was not an option.
It was July 1974. A steady predawn drizzle had given way to overcast skies when William Simon, newly appointed U.S. Treasury secretary, and his deputy, Gerry Parsky, stepped onto an 8 a.m. flight from Andrews Air Force Base. On board, the mood was tense. That year, the oil crisis had hit home. An embargo by OPEC’s Arab nations—payback for U.S. military aid to the Israelis during the Yom Kippur War—quadrupled oil prices. Inflation soared, the stock market crashed, and the U.S. economy was in a tailspin.
Officially, Simon’s two-week trip was billed as a tour of economic diplomacy across Europe and the Middle East, full of the customary meet-and-greets and evening banquets. But the real mission, kept in strict confidence within President Richard Nixon’s inner circle, would take place during a four-day layover in the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The goal: neutralize crude oil as an economic weapon and find a way to persuade a hostile kingdom to finance America’s widening deficit with its newfound petrodollar wealth. And according to Parsky, Nixon made clear there was simply no coming back empty-handed. Failure would not only jeopardize America’s financial health but could also give the Soviet Union an opening to make further inroads into the Arab world.
It “wasn’t a question of whether it could be done or it couldn’t be done,” said Parsky, 73, one of the few officials with Simon during the Saudi talks.
At first blush, Simon, who had just done a stint as Nixon’s energy czar, seemed ill-suited for such delicate diplomacy. Before being tapped by Nixon, the chain-smoking New Jersey native ran the vaunted Treasuries desk at Salomon Brothers. To career bureaucrats, the brash Wall Street bond trader—who once compared himself to Genghis Khan—had a temper and an outsize ego that was painfully out of step in Washington. Just a week before setting foot in Saudi Arabia, Simon publicly lambasted the Shah of Iran, a close regional ally at the time, calling him a “nut.”
But Simon, better than anyone else, understood the appeal of U.S. government debt and how to sell the Saudis on the idea that America was the safest place to park their petrodollars. With that knowledge, the administration hatched an unprecedented do-or-die plan that would come to influence just about every aspect of U.S.-Saudi relations over the next four decades (Simon died in 2000 at the age of 72).
The basic framework was strikingly simple. The U.S. would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending.
It took several discreet follow-up meetings to iron out all the details, Parsky said. But at the end of months of negotiations, there remained one small, yet crucial, catch: King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud demanded the country’s Treasury purchases stay “strictly secret,” according to a diplomatic cable obtained by Bloomberg from the National Archives database.
With a handful of Treasury and Federal Reserve officials, the secret was kept for more than four decades—until now. In response to a Freedom-of-Information-Act request submitted by Bloomberg News, the Treasury broke out Saudi Arabia’s holdings for the first time this month after “concluding that it was consistent with transparency and the law to disclose the data,” according to spokeswoman Whitney Smith. The $117 billion trove makes the kingdom one of America’s largest foreign creditors.
Yet in many ways, the information has raised more questions than it has answered. A former Treasury official, who specialized in central bank reserves and asked not to be identified, says the official figure vastly understates Saudi Arabia’s investments in U.S. government debt, which may be double or more.
I guess he didn't but the key is that the US could make that flow of dollars disappear by forging this agreement with the Saudis, and that inflation didn't show up because those dollars didn't recirculate and instead were parked in US government debt.