© Glenn Waters / Getty Images. 18.

1. Latest figures from the US Treasury Department show that Russia and Turkey are not the only countries to dump US debt bonds. Washington’s second-biggest creditor, Japan, is doing the same. Tokyo dumped $82.9 billion, or seven percent of its US Treasuries holdings, over the twelve months ending in June - the latest month for which data is available. In June alone, the country sold off $18.4 billion worth of the US securities. Japan’s holding as of June totals $1.03 trillion, the lowest since October 2011, though the country still remains the second-biggest holder of US debt. Read more China, the biggest holder of the US sovereign debt at $1.178 trillion, sold $4.4 billion worth of the US bonds in June.

Since October 2011, China’s share of US Treasuries has declined by $138 billion. A fairly insignificant amount, but the escalating trade conflict with Washington could prompt Beijing to start massively dumping its holdings. The move could spell disaster for the US financial system. Liquidating US Treasuries, one of the world's safest and most actively-traded financial assets, has recently become a trend among major holders. Russia dumped 84 percent of its holdings this year, with its remaining holdings as of June totaling just $14.9 billion. With relations between Moscow and Washington at their lowest point in decades, the Central Bank of Russia explained the decision was based on financial, economic and geopolitical risks.

At the same time, Turkey fell off the list of major foreign holders of US government securities by slashing its share of US bonds and notes to $28.8 billion in June from $32.6 billion in May. Turkey’s holding of US Treasuries has fallen by 42 percent during the first half of the year. Ankara and Washington are in a diplomatic standoff over the detention of US pastor Andrew Brunson in Turkey. Brunson has been charged with assisting the failed military coup two years ago. He faces 35 years in a Turkish prison. A treasury bond is a fixed-interest government debt security with a maturity of more than 10 years. Treasury bonds make interest payments two times a year.

Financial instruments such as government bonds are vital for countries that are used to living on credit. US Treasuries are critical to the US government's ability to borrow money to balance the budget. Turkey follows Russia in dumping US Treasury securities Published time: 16 Aug, 2018 10:10 Edited time: 16 Aug, 2018 16:28. Whirling dervishes at the Galata Mevlevihane, Istanbul, 2013 © Gurcan Ozturk / AFP. Turkey’s holding of US sovereign bonds saw a nearly 12-percent decline from May to June as Ankara seeks to diversify away from the US dollar amid an escalating diplomatic conflict with Washington. In June, Turkey’s share of US Treasury securities dropped to $28.8 billion from $32.6 billion in the previous month, according to financial and political news aggregator. Since the end of last year, the country has reportedly decreased its holdings of T-bills, bonds and notes by 52 percent.

Read more Earlier this year, a revealed that the Central Bank of Russia had sharply slashed the country’s holdings of US sovereign debt. The regulator linked the measure to increased concerns over various risks, including financial, economic and geopolitical. In May, Russia’s share hit an 11-year low and totaled just $14.9 billion. However, the latest data shows that Moscow slowed down its massive sell-off of US Treasury bonds with the figure remaining unchanged in June. The conflict between Ankara and Washington was sparked by the detention of American pastor Andrew Brunson in Turkey. Brunson has been charged with assisting the failed military coup two years ago.

He is facing 35 years in a Turkish prison. Washington has introduced sanctions against Turkish officials and slapped the country's steel and aluminum exports with extra tariffs. Ankara retaliated by applying tariffs on a number of US products including alcohol, tobacco and cars, while President Erdogan has called for a boycott of American electronic products. The Turkish sell-off of the US debt will reportedly continue into August as relations with the White House continue to deteriorate.

Not just the Dotard, even the Nigger was think that USA already got the entire world's dependency on USD$ currency and take the whole world firmly as HOSTAGE, and can always BLACKMAIL the world to bail out USD$ currency, because they all need to use it as THE INTERNATIONAL currency for trade between nations. Now, China is rising up and becoming the most important BUY/SELL partner for everyone else, IN PLACE OF USA. When China say, use no USD$ currency, use my RMB$ currency, the world will be happy to DITCH THE BURDEN OF USD$ RISK & PAINS. Once USD$ currency is no longer the currency used for INTERNATIONAL CURRENCY, NOBODY WILL BOTHER TO RESCUE USD$ NOR BE TAKEN HOSTAGE BY USA, just dump it ban it and forget all about it. Let Dotard go and die.

You need to do the REVERSED to have momentum for the ATTACK. This is like if you want to punch some one you have to pack your punch 1st, you draw your fist backwards 1st, before you throw punch forward.

Similarly, if you want to Axe some one, you have to swing the axe backwards 1st, then chop forward, simple physics. Better to say Arrow & Bow, you draw BACKWARD in order to shoot FORWARD. You don't draw there is no strength to shoot forward at all, the more you draw backwards, the stronger you will shoot forward. So USD$ is set to get fucked. You need to do the REVERSED to have momentum for the ATTACK. This is like if you want to punch some one you have to pack your punch 1st, you draw your fist backwards 1st, before you throw punch forward.

Similarly, if you want to Axe some one, you have to swing the axe backwards 1st, then chop forward, simple physics. Better to say Arrow & Bow, you draw BACKWARD in order to shoot FORWARD.

You don't draw there is no strength to shoot forward at all, the more you draw backwards, the stronger you will shoot forward. So USD$ is set to get fucked. Not just the Dotard, even the Nigger was think that USA already got the entire world's dependency on USD$ currency and take the whole world firmly as HOSTAGE, and can always BLACKMAIL the world to bail out USD$ currency, because they all need to use it as THE INTERNATIONAL currency for trade between nations. Now, China is rising up and becoming the most important BUY/SELL partner for everyone else, IN PLACE OF USA. When China say, use no USD$ currency, use my RMB$ currency, the world will be happy to DITCH THE BURDEN OF USD$ RISK & PAINS.

Once USD$ currency is no longer the currency used for INTERNATIONAL CURRENCY, NOBODY WILL BOTHER TO RESCUE USD$ NOR BE TAKEN HOSTAGE BY USA, just dump it ban it and forget all about it. Let Dotard go and die. Trump just triggered a new financial crisis. Here’s why Dan Glazebrook is a freelance political writer who has written for RT, Counterpunch, Z magazine, the Morning Star, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Independent and Middle East Eye, amongst others. His first book “Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis” was published by Liberation Media in October 2013. It featured a collection of articles written from 2009 onwards examining the links between economic collapse, the rise of the BRICS, war on Libya and Syria and 'austerity'. He is currently researching a book on US-British use of sectarian death squads against independent states and movements from Northern Ireland and Central America in the 1970s and 80s to the Middle East and Africa today.

Published time: 17 Aug, 2018 13:05. © Brendan McDermid / Reuters. 430. Trump’s attack on the Turkish lira, combined with recent Federal Reserve moves to choke off dollar supply, is pushing the world towards a re-run of the 1997 currency crisis. This may well be the whole point. Last Friday, Donald Trump announced new sanctions on Turkey – comprising a doubling of the steel and aluminum tariffs he had introduced earlier this year. Turkey’s currency was already struggling, but these new sanctions “ are the straw that broke the camel’s back,” according to Edward Park of the UK investment management firm Brooks Macdonald.

The same day, the Turkish lirato more than six to the dollar, the first time it had ever done so, hitting a low point of 7.21 to the dollar on Sunday. Following Turkish caps on currency swaps, it slightly regained some of its lost value, and was trading at 6.12 by Wednesday, still way below the 4.75 to the dollar it was worth last week. While the Turkish move has had some effect, this should not be overstated: simply banning the trading of lira above certain limits, which is effectively what Turkey has done, is hardly a sustainable means of revalorizing the currency; and, investors “ are still ratcheting up bets against Turkey in other ways, such as through credit default swaps that pay out in the case of a debt default.” Turkish bank shares now stand at their lowest level since 2003.

Underlying the currency’s vulnerability are the country’s massive dollar debts. Turkish companies now owe almost in foreign-denominated debt, a figure which stands at. The question is – how did this happen, and why has it suddenly now become a problem? During the era of quantitative easing (QE), the US Federal Reserve flooded US financial institutions with $3.5 trillion in new dollars, much of which poured into so-called ‘emerging markets’ such as Turkey. So long as the music kept playing, this was fine – near-zero interest rates, combined with a weak dollar, made these debts affordable. But since the Federal Reserve ended its program of QE last year – and then started to reverse it, selling off the financial assets it had purchased (and thus effectively taking dollars out of the financial system) – the dollar’s value has started to rise again, making debt repayments less affordable. This appreciation of the dollar has been compounded by two successive interest-rate rises by the Reserve; but it has also been compounded by Trump’s actions.

Paradoxically, Trump’s trade wars have led to a further rise in the dollar, as investors have viewed it as a ‘safe haven’ compared to other currencies deemed less able to withstand the unpredictable turbulence he has unleashed. Even the yen and the Swiss franc, traditionally viewed as ‘good as gold,’ have as, indeed, has gold itself. As Aly-Khan Satchu, founder and CEO at Rich Management, has that the “ US dollar has been weaponized – either deliberately or by design” (is there a difference?), adding that the “ dollar is basically kneecapping countries,” warning that other countries will face the same treatment “ if they continue to pursue the policies that Erdogan is seeking to pursue.” Thus, Turkey has been hit by a quadruple whammy by the US – interest-rate hikes and the choking-off of dollars from the Fed; tariffs and sanctions from Trump. The result is a loss in the lira’s value of almost 40 percent since the start of the year.

The effects are already being felt far beyond Turkey’s borders; the South African rand fell to a two-year low on Monday, and the Indian rupee, Mexican peso and Indonesian rupiah have all been hard hit. This is unsurprising, as the ballooning of dollar-denominated debts – from $2 trillion 15 years ago to, largely in the global south – combined with the reversal of QE, was a.

All the conditions which prefigured the 1997 east Asian currency crisis are now effectively in place. All that’s needed is a push – which is exactly what Trump has just given. This is textbook stuff – or should be, if economics textbooks bore any relation to reality (which they don’t). The last 10 years are virtually an exact replay of the decade or so running up to the 1997 crisis. While the 1985 ‘Plaza Accord’ dollar devaluation was not exactly QE, it had the same intent and results – a flood of cheap money and dollar debt, and therefore growing global dependence on the dollar and vulnerability to US monetary and economic policy. READ MORE: This vulnerability was then effectively ‘cashed in’ with the ‘reverse Plaza accord’ 10 years later, which, as with the current reversal of QE, choked off credit and ramped up interest rates, making markets more jumpy and bankruptcies more likely.

In the end, the trigger was the collapse of the baht – the currency of a country (Thailand) with a GDP half that of Turkey – which spiraled into a crisis that ultimately spread across all of Asia, sabotaging the continent’s development and allowing US corporations to buy up some of the most advanced industrial plant in the world for a fraction of its value. It is not hard, then, to see why Trump and the Fed might well wish to trigger such a crisis today. The more the currencies of dollar-indebted countries slide, the more real goods and services they have to pay in tribute to the US to service the same paper-dollar debts – while those who cannot keep up will be gobbled up for pennies on the dollar. © Ilya Naymushin / Reuters. 533. The Central Bank of Russia bought 26.1 tons of gold in July, bringing its holdings to 2,170 tons, according to International Monetary Fund data compiled by Bloomberg. It’s the largest single monthly purchase since late 2017.

Ugly First Half Spells Disaster For Mac Free

The stockpile was valued at $77.4 billion at the end of last month, according to the Russian central bank’s website. At current prices, the reserves are worth around $83.6 billion. Read more Russian bullion holdings are approaching the Soviet peak of 2,800 tons, which were seen in 1941. Over the last decade, the country’s share of gold in reserves has soared tenfold. Russia has also continued reducing its holdings of US treasuries. It has lowered its holdings of US debt from $96.1 billion in March to just $14.9 billion in May. The increased gold purchases come as the Trump administration gets ready to impose new sanctions on Moscow.

Ugly First Half Spells Disaster For Machine

The central bank’s First Deputy Governor Dmitry Tulin said that Moscow sees gold as a “100-percent guarantee from legal and political risks.” The central bank also explained the strategy as part of diversifying the country’s reserves away from the US dollar. According to the World Gold Council, Russia is not only the largest official buyer of gold but also the world’s third-biggest producer, with its central bank purchasing from domestic miners through commercial banks.

In the past decade alone, Russia has mined more than 2,000 tons of gold, with annual production expected to rise by 400 tons by 2030.