Skip to main content

The Global: A proposal for a new global currency



 I don’t understand economics all too well, beyond what a sporadically employed writer can be expected to understand.

Having said that, I think that puts me in a unique position to explain to you, in simple terms, what I see unfolding before me in the world of currency.

The American dollar, shored up by oil and its free access to the printing press, courtesy of the Federal Reserve, is under enormous pressure. Despite assurances that all is well, and despite the rising stock prices, insiders seem to think the dollar’s day is over. All over the world, nations have started to use their own national currencies to trade, which means that America’s middleman fees have been eliminated. In addition, there’s the questioning of where the “safe haven” is, in reality. With the USA printing 17 trillion dollars in the last decade, under the confident assumption that its economy would always be the eternal safe haven, there’s an oversupply of dollars. And what happens if you print too much money? Eventually, someone ends up with too much of it. And that means whoever’s hoarding dollars is going to see a serious dip in their stock when the dollar eventually plunges. Which many American commentators seem to think has already happened—but is being withheld from you for fear of what may transpire after this news comes out.

Insiders also seem to think the Feds are not going to change their ways. Despite telling the world they are finally going to quit their dollar printing habit, they will secretly continue to shoot up with the greenback. This sets a dangerous precedent, because this means all other nations (Japan, the EU, Thailand, etc) all want a hit of this good stuff. This is known as QE, or “quantitative easing”, and basically it’s a fancy term to mean that countries decide to print money even when their economies are not going all that well. Easy money, however, is rarely easy—when all nations start clamoring for easy cash, it means the initial nation who’d climbed up a bit above the rest is now in the position of finding out its easy cash is worth the same as before, because essentially everyone else has cottoned on and done the same as them. As you can see, this is a game that has no ending.

So who controls the printing of money? It appears that besides the Fed, there are a number of private banks able to set this operation in action. In addition, there seems to be a secret cabal of insiders, otherwise known as the Bank of International Settlement, that has been telling countries since the end of Nazi Germany how much money each nation can print. As you can see, this makes it easy for some countries to become richer than the rest—if you are printing a trillion dollar a year just to run your government’s expenses, and a lot of this is going to bailout private banks, and those banks are selling stocks to private citizens, this means that even when the stocks fall it doesn’t really matter because the government just keeps printing more money to shore up the banks. This means crappy Silicon Valley companies designing apps for head waiters, and crappy Hollywood making films about frankfurters having an existential crisis, and crappy military-industrial companies designing mosquito drones to torture political activists at night, will never run out of funding.

US dollars were so good that in 2008 George Bush was selling billions of worth of military crap to Saudi Arabia, where the sheikhs happily bought up the hardware. In 2014, however, even the Saudis seemed to have decided not to co-operate with the New World Order—allowing the oil prices to fall, in essence, is a way for OPEC to destroy the petro-dollar.

In other words, people have realized that the New World Order, headed by the US and supported by Europe and the rest, is no longer a tenable way to run the world’s finances. Not to mention its geo-political landscape, which has been riddled with one invasion after another of sovereign countries,  false-flag operations, and torture and genocide that the US takes as a divinely entitled right.

So how do we move forward, as a world community, now that people realize that this way of managing the world finances is no longer good enough?

The IMF and its SDR basket currency is a bad idea, because again this is the same Western dominated model, where a centralized authority decides on the value of currency.

I think therefore that whatever will come from this moment is not a centrally controlled currency. What has to evolve is a currency that is available to all countries, and that all countries are able to control it, in a way that is fair and equitable, according to their economic worth. I am unsure what the mechanisms of this will be, but it appears to me that having a currency that is not tied to a national currency is the best solution.

So lets call this new currency “The Global.” And lets say that it is slightly less than the euro in value, and slightly more than the dollar. It is available to the National Banks of all nation-states, which will print this international currency alongside its domestic currency. All countries will print this new international currency, which will be used to trade between different nations. The agreement of which country can print how many Globals will be set by international authorities more efficient than the UN. They will, after crunching numbers, decide each country’s economic worth and its concurrent Globals.

Nepal, for instance, has no money to speak of, but in the last decade it has exported almost all its youth to the Gulf countries, which in turn supply the USA with oil. The Gulf countries are not always good about paying their workers, which means in the last two decades, these countries in all likelihood owe the Nepalis about a trillion dollars in unpaid back pay. Now lets say this trillion dollars is the obligation of the international community to repay-especially the countries that have been consuming Gulf oil, and selling military hardware to the Gulf, and so on. So when this international authority that regulates the Global currency comes into operation, it has to factor in these non-accounted for currency transactions from the last few decades—allowing Nepal’s government, in essence, one trillion Globals to trade with other economies. That is just reparations for unpaid labor. Nepal should also get a separate package for climate change harm done to its environment and communities by oil-dependent economies. These two packages would be added to the other Globals Nepal can print due to the size of its economy. Ditto for India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and all those other labor exporting countries which have seen great suffering and exploitation for little gain.

To avoid African dictators and so forth from stealing all the Globals from their people, we could introduce a model in which the Globals can only be traded for certain goods and commodities, and not others. Meaning that Globals cannot go straight from a dictator’s bank account to the latest Lamborgini model or the latest Gucci bags—there will be certain checks and balances in place to ensure the trade is within limits and that the benefits of trading is shared, more or less, by the citizens of that country. Perhaps a certain percentage of the Globals’s profits must be reinvested back into health, education, social welfare, et cetera. 

As we have all realized, the idea of Western countries printing money and handing it out in dribs and drabs to Third World countries to “develop” themselves hasn’t really worked out in the long term. Nor has the neo-colonial model of rape and pillage of natural resources in the peripheries to feed the center.

Now that I have explained my nifty little concept of the Global for you, I hope some of you will take that into consideration the next time a nation decides the IMF is the way to go. And by the way, as someone beset by piracy and who has had her books and stories stolen multiple times by Western publishing houses, I would be glad if you could give me credit as the original source when the Global comes out.

Enjoy the last four months of the greenback’s supremacy—I predict this is the last 4 months before the dollar becomes just one currency amongst many others.

***





Comments

Manoj Aryal said…
Nice post, i hope to read more travelogue..! culture, society and people...!

Popular posts from this blog

The Bitter Truth: Talat Abbasi's Bitter Gourds

The stories are small, but with a spicy aftertaste that could be from nowhere else but the subcontinent. Talat Abbasi's Bitter Gourd and Other Stories is a collection of nugget sized, delectable tales laid out, in typical desi fashion, amongst the detritus of social stratification, family ennui, economic marginalization and diaspora. Gently dousing her stories with a generous portion of irony and satire, the Karachi born writer brings to the fore the small hypocrisies and the mundane corruptions of everyday life in Pakistan. Whether dealing with a birdman or a poor relation, a rich widow or an immigrant mother, Ms. Abbasi touches the mythic heart that ticks besides all these caricatures. The ghostly narrative influence of Virginia Woolf, with a pinch of Victorian lit thrown in for good measure, is discernable, although most of the voices are centered around the "how kind, how kind" echoes of South Asia. The book starts, appropriately, with a story about a feudal patro...

Milk and rice

Sushma Joshi I am the youngest of seven cousins. When we were little, we used to play lukamari , or hide-and-seek, games in the garden. My eldest cousin sister, taking pity on me, would allow me to be a dudh-bhat (milk and rice) during our games. A dudh-bhat is someone too young to play the game adequately, but the older children allow this young one to tag along and never be “outed” from the game because they might cry if made to leave. So this means you are endlessly in the game, even when in reality you should really be out. Of course, being the youngest means you may always retain the status of a dudh-bhat even when you do grow up. In Nepal, as we know all too well, the hierarchy of age allows the young some privileges, along with the old. It appears to me Madhav Kumar, even though he's lost the game twice in two elections, is being allowed to be the dudh-bhat by his wiser and more tolerant elders. He is allowed to be in the game endlessly even though in reality he should real...

Navaratri and Navagraha

The Annapurna Post asked me to contribute an article this Dashain. And since it was a day or so away from Navami, I decided to write this article.                                                                            *** Navaratri is dedicated to nine forms of Goddess Durga, consort of Lord Shiva. She appears in different forms: as Shailaputri or daughter of the Himalayas on the first day of  ghatasthapana ; as virginal Brahmacharini on the second day; as Chandraghanta, wearing a crown made of the moon in the shape of a bell on her head on the third; as Kusmanda, the one who embodies the universe, on the fourth; as Skandamata, mother of Kartikya who slays demon Tarkasur, on the fifth day; as Katyayani, who slays the demon Mahisasur, on the sixth; as Kaalratri, who reminds us of the ine...