Category: united states
When members of the UN Security Council wage war at each other… It is clear that in a supposedly common struggle against a common enemy – the Islamic State – two great powers (and their “allies”) now oppose each other, USA against Russia, and the irony is that each relies on the legitimacy of the […]
General strategy: the eye of the storm Like we started warning in our last GEAB issue, the utmost caution is still required these days. The appearance of recovery, here and there, is either the effect of short-term communication, or sources of disruptions with unpredictable consequences (or both). Our general advice is to stay vigilant and […]
The United States and Europe present striking similarities in their destinies. The way Brexit (itself a negative event) manages to free an EU paralysed by vast structural dysfunctions; Trump’s election (so traumatic for the Americans) probably provides an opportunity to redeem the country (and its partners) from a stifling allegiance system. We have repeatedly shown […]
The arrival of the petro-Yuan is of course the end of the dollar as a pillar of the international monetary system and thus the end of the unavoidability of the dollar, a national currency that the vagaries of history have led to support the global economy, which are currently too heavy for it. Since there […]
As we have seen at the Davos Forum – and more generally in the recent developments over international relations – two models compete on the transatlantic stage, especially with regards to trade. On the one hand, a return to a form of national protectionism in a unilateral approach and on the other hand, a liberal […]
The world’s biggest oil importer, China is preparing to launch gold-backed Yuan-denominated oil futures, possibly creating the most important Asian benchmark in the oil sector, allowing oil exporters to switch from US dollar-denominated assets by transactions in Yuan[1]. To make the Yuan-denominated contracts more attractive, China plans to have the Yuan fully convertible into gold […]
The multi-polarisation of the planet is currently going through a bipolarisation phase, something we anticipated in 2009, if Europe could not reposition itself intelligently, taking clear account of the great global geopolitical reconfiguration. Having dealt with the Middle East (without success, so far, since Iran has not yet yielded[1] – but it’s only in November […]
End 2017/early 2018, all major Western Central Banks will be putting a final stop to the 2008 crisis-related unconventional monetary policies, namely the famous quantitative easing policies (QEs) which enabled to provide liquidity to those banks which saw their mutual confidence for borrowing collapse in the aftermath of the subprime crisis. Fiscal QE in rich […]
The end of the year will be rich in surprises and escalation risks, as we have been saying for the last two months. Currently, all eyes are on the Middle East, the world’s powder keg, and on the tensions emerging around Lebanon, involving nothing less than protagonists like the United States, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia […]
To strengthen the eurozone, the European Commission has just launched the idea of creating products backed by European sovereign debt, a proposal which could be more an alternative than a precedent for the Eurobonds. On May 31, 2017, the European Commission presented its analysis on the “deepening of the Economic and Monetary Union”[1], which had […]
May 19 – Iran: presidential election A serious opponent is now threatening the chances of re-election of the reformist Hassan Rohani. This man is the ultra-conservative Ebrahim Raissi, reinforced by the great geopolitical tensions surrounding Iran: war against Saudi Arabia in Yemen, involvement in the Syrian conflict, Israeli threats of aggression, risk of questioning the […]
This expression “chaotic recomposition” seems best to summarise the phase where we currently are with regards to the development of the crisis, a step indicated here as extending over four years and which will include distinct progression phases. It is quite clear that efforts to reorganise the world on a transnational logic have all failed […]
Without Kissinger to negotiate the petrodollar and put the US currency back to the centre of the global game after the shock of Nixon’s announcement in 1971 to halt the convertibility of the dollar to gold, the greenback would never have been the world benchmark since more than 40 years. Will Trump really know how […]
Within the global systemic crisis that we are now experiencing, our experts have been talking for some years about “statistical fog” to qualify the inability of today’s tools to measure real economy, or even the way to manipulate them in order to match results to the political speech (or vice versa). Leaving aside the temptation […]
Since Deng Xiaoping, in the ’70s, gave top priority to economic development[1], China has made tremendous sacrifices. Having worked hard and cheap and polluting its country, it soon became the workshop of the world. But all those sacrifices were not in vain. Barely 15 years later for instance, in 1993, Shanghai was able to launch […]
The United States has been voluntarily isolating itself from the rest of the world, and not just from a geopolitical point of view. This terrible isolation can only get worse, whatever the result of the presidential election: if Trump wins, it will be due to a lack of foreign policy; in the case of Clinton, […]
Both in the United States and around the world, this news has been making some noise: since October the 1st, the internet is finally “free from US tutelage.” Is it, indeed? It is true that a decisive step has just been reached, since the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), a central internet […]
In short, the answer is, not much. But let’s elaborate! As our team noted in the September issue, Brexit unleashed a large potential to reorganise Europe with, as it happens in transitions, huge opportunities but also great dangers. But citizens of several countries at the heart of Europe find themselves stuck in unnecessary and dysfunctional […]