The End of US Financial Hegemony

Welcome to the Econoclasts. In the week when the latest diplomatic effort to solve the war in Iran has failed, Donald Trump was to send his two envoys, Steve Whitkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner to Pakistan, except that there were no Iranians by the time they would have arrived. It was very clear that Iran did not want to enter into negotiations with the United States at this point. We're seeing a lot of diplomatic huffing and puff ing, Trump is playing the markets, as he always does, and he is trying to reassure the world that there is a peace process underway when in fact there is not. Welcome Yanis. How are you today? And uh where are you today? I mean Egila at home. Hello Wolfgang. Hello to everyone. Yeah, I've been hearing you describe this week uh as uh the week when diplomacy seemed to be uh effectively slowing down and turning this whole process of the blockade of Hormuz, the double blockade of Hormuz into a kind of medium, maybe a long-term strategy that is going to have very significant effects. I mean, so looking at all this, I've been thinking that, you know, the petrol dollar is in a very serious uh state of peril. The United States Gulf allies cannot earn dollars from gas and oil to buy treasuries. Meanwhile, Iran and Russia are selling oil in one . And as if that were not enough, I I I don't know whether you saw this in the Financial Times this morning, Wall Street Banks, led by Goldman Sachs, who always have a nose for where the wind blows, have borrowed record amounts of one this year on behalf of Portugal, of Finland, of Norway, of various uh Western powers. So you know the the American dollar hegemony is, you know, seems to be on the wane this week, more so than than in previous weeks. And what's gonna be your story or your your theme for this week? Well, the big story uh from where I'm standing is the swap lines that um the Gulf states uh seem to have requested , and which Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, has happily granted or claimed that he's going to grant. I think that uh these swap lines, which are being presented in the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and so on, as a kind of bailout for the Gulf states. Well I think that is the false orthodoxy. The point I will be making is that, you know, the Gulf states don't so much need a bailout. It is the United States government and the Wall Street banks that are being bailed out through this very strong symbolic statement about the institution, the creation of these swap lines. I'm concerned about them too. I perhaps you know, I haven't thought it through t quite to the extent that you have, but it's certainly telling us, and you know, I'm I'm I'm sort of pleading sort of ignorance here, that I know, you know, I don't think I understand why these swap lines are given, because for starters the UAE don't doesn't need it. Uh if you look at the books of the c of the UAE, you know, they have ten times as much dollar assets than the exchange stabilization fund, which is the counterparty to the swap. That's right. This doesn't make sense. Well it does if you think of it as a as a bailout of the United States, not of the Gulf states. That's a plausible it's a plausible scenario, I have to say. It could also be a recognition that we might actually have a very severe f severe financial crisis. ahead So Wolfgang, what are you going to be talking about today? I will be talking about the uh on the same theme, broad theme on the Iran War, but I want to talk about the uh the scenarios in which we're in. We sort of distinguished in the early phase on the you know, the good, the medium and the bad scenario, the the baseline as as people always refer to, the good scenario. I think we're no longer in that scenario. So we are in this sort of in one of the bad scenarios and the you know the adverse or the severe scenarios, however you might want to call them. And I'm saying that this war will, you know, the the the standoff will continue for longer than people think. And even if it is resolved, and when it is resolved, we will not be returning to the status quo ante. So this is gonna be a a shock a persistent shock to the global economy. So folks this is what we're going to be talking about today so don't go anywhere . Welcome back to the Econoclass. Did you hear the news that the United Arab Emirates and some some other of the Gulf Council states, including Saudi Arabia, have requested, officially and officially I'm not sure, a swap line with the American government. A request that uh Scott Bessent, the US Treasury Secretary, said he will be granting and uh he spoke he waxed lyrical about it. Now, the orthodox view of this swap line is that the United States is offering the Gulf states whose economies it tanked with this preposterous war in Iran. So Washington, that's a story, right? That's the orthodoxy is offering those uh Gulf state countries that it did so much to damage, it's offering them a lifeline, a bailout. Now this is, I'm going to argue, is a seriously false explanation. It is an easy mistake to make, but it is a gross mistake nevertheless. The point I'm going to be making is that this swap line is a bailout for the United States government and for the Wall Street banks. It is not a bailout for the Gulf states. Now let's begin from the basics. What's a dollar swap line. It is a central bank to central bank facility aimed at maintaining access to dollars in foreign countries that do not print dollars. So for example, after Wall Street went pear-shaped in uh the fall of two thousand eight, and the German and the French banks um were caught out with huge liabilities in American dollars due to the subprime crisis. They had invested, they had stupidly purchased all the CDOs from uh American uh financi ers and you know when they all lost their value, they tanked, the German and the French banks didn't dollars to repay. And the European Central Bank couldn't give them the dollars. So the swap lines that the Fed offered the European Central Bank effectively . More recently, we had another swap line that uh made the news, the headlines. Uh it was uh Scott Besson's attempt to help uh Argentina's President Millet, just before an election that uh was pivotal in Millet maintaining power, the Treasury, the American Treasury, gave a swap line of twenty billion to the central bank of uh Argentina to prop up the value of the peso just before the elections. That was not a Fed swap line. This is important to distinguish because there's a difference between a swap line offered by the Central Bank of America and one offered by the Treasury. When the Fed offers a swap line, it can do it without any congressional approval, it can do it without any limitations at all. They are unlimited swap lines. And precisely because they are unlimited swap lines, as they were in two thousand and eight, they can be extremely powerful as a tool because financiers all over the world know that they you know they are betting against the Fed that has no limitations in how many dollars it can provide through a swap line to the Europeans, the Japanese and so on. But when it is the Treasury Secretary, the Treasury that offers a swap line, that is severely limited. The maximum that he can offer is something like 220, two hundred and nineteen to be precise, billion, through a so-called exchange stabilization fund. So this is what he's offering. Now people ask, and Wolfgang, you asked that in our introduction, why do the Gulf states need 2 19 billion? I mean, the accumulated dollar assets of the Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, are around six trillion dollars amongst eleven different sovereign wealth funds. They've also built up one point seven trillion, that's on top of the 6 trillion, an additional 1.7 trillion of foreign exchange reserves that those central banks hold. So, you know, Americans, especially the MAGA crowd, ask, uh, why give them a smoke line? Answer is: my answer is, they are not giving them a swap line to bail them out. It is bailing out the American financial system. And here's my story. Now, since uh the early 1970s, after the end of Bretton Woods and the emergence of the so-called petrol dollar , the Gulf states have been making zillions of dollars, especially after 1972, 73, the first uh oil crisis when the price uh of oil uh shot up uh from three to ten to twenty to thirty dollars a bottle. Yeah, these Gulf states have been making zillions of dollars. And what do they do with them? They send them to Wall Street to be recycled as American debt, treasuries, weaponry purchased from the military industrial complex, some equity, and lots, of course, of real estate. Now, the moment the Gulf states are in trouble and their receipts are coming down, as they are because of this war, so is the United States government, uh, the treasury market. So is the American military industrial complex. And indeed, so our realtors like Donald Trump who rely on these petrol dollars being recycled through American real estate. Remember, we have a an American government, the federal government, that has a budget deficit of eight percent. And that is sustainable only because of this dollar recycling. Not just the petro dollars, also Chinese dollars and Japanese dollars. But the petrol dollar market is a very important source of financing for the American system. Remember, in recent months, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States have promised Donald Trump, one point four trillion of investments in American semiconductors, in quantum computing, in biotech , in energy, okay, and AI infrastructure. That's one point four trillion that was going to flood, flow from the Gulf to the United States, part of this recycling. And in addition to that, Saudi Arabia had promised Trump purchases of one trillion dollars worth of weaponry. That's how call it protection money. All that's gone now. More than two and a half or about two and a half trillion dollars that was supposed to flow from the Gulf states to the American financial system. Now Scott Bessant, he's not um somebody who doesn't understand what that means. Remember, he made his fortune and his fame by being a poacher, by shorting, along with uh George Soros, the Bank of England. And now he's a poacher that has turned gamekeeper. And he was really very worried that poachers like he used to be around the world may start taking bets against the American financial system, against the bond market, when, you know, suddenly two and a half trillion of petrol dollars that was going to go to the United States in the next few months, few months, ten, twelve, eighteen months, is now coming out of that recycling scheme. So this is how I arrest my case, Wolfgang. This is a bailout for the United States by the United States. I follow you most most most of the way here. I think I think you're absolutely right to raise the issue. I think it's also the big under reported story of the war so far. Because you know, I guess it is really um really a sign of stress . Uh and I think we we're completely in agreement on this. I also agree with you that Bessent is no fool. You know, he wouldn't have done this if he hadn't understood the risks. I'm myself a little bit more circumspect about the nature of the risks. It could be something broader than than a bailout of the financial sector. It could be worse. It could be a fear that a of a broader base collapse of the dollar market. Just how a 20 billion swap would would fix this is not clear given you you cited the numbers. Uh UAE alone has assets of including reserves and sovereign wealth fund assets of like something like two trillion. That's about ten times as much as the entire stabilization fund. So you wonder what is what instrument is this, what what can it conceivably do? Certainly not under normal circumstances, that would not be needed. Uh UAE is liquid and solvent. There isn't an issue here. But if you fe ar you know a massive collapse of the global financial sector, then that might be the case. I don't want to speculate on what what the reason is, but it is if you know at face value the strangest news story of the year. It is unbelievable or hard to believe. If someone had told me that they would do this, I would not have believed this. So what it could mean, you know, I think a bailout of the US financial system is certainly part of that. But I think we might see stress. If this continues for a long time, if Iran were to, you know, blow up further oil installations, Iran might blow up the internet lines, the undersea cables in the Persian Gulf and con disconnect large parts of the Arab world from the you know from the internet. This would have huge implications for for banks and for financial security. So what what it tells us is that something really, really strange is happening and that the risks in the that they are trying to insure against are very, very significant. Well look, nothing of what you said, I think contradicts my story. When I w was talking about bailing out the American government, the American financial system, this is the same thing as what you're saying. The global payments system, the global financial networks, because they're one and the same. The global financial uh networks coincide with uh the dollar payment system. And uh the dollar payment system, the hegemony of the dollar, depends on this recycling of other people's dollars into Wall Street, into treas uries, into the military industrial complex. So that is what is at stake. At the moment you have an impediment, something stopping this recycling mechanism from working, in the way that it's been working since they're very early 1970s, uh, then the dollar hegemony and the whole edifice that you described is uh tittering uh you know on the edge of collapse. Now, uh as you said, and as as I as I said, Scott Besson doesn't have the capacity of the Fed to extend um swap lines uh in an unlimited fashion, which is what he would need to have. What he does have, that particular um uh facility that we both mentioned, which is limited to two hundred and nineteen billion dollars, which is pitiful. It's not just twenty, even two hundred and twenty wouldn't do it. I think that what by saying what he said, using his uh authority over that particular swap line, however limited it may be, was simply a very powerful signaling mechanism. Scott Besson wanted to signal to the financial markets the United States is going to bail out itself if needs be. Now, if I were a financier working in London, in Singapore, in Hong Kong and so on, the way I would interpret it is to say this. Scott Besson doesn't have the capacity to offer a proper swap line of the unlimited size that would be necessary. But Jay Powell is on the way out of the Fed. And maybe what Scott Bessant is signaling is that the new chairman of the Fed, who has been totally approved by the Trump administration is going to come on board with the idea of offering swap lines if needs be in order to maintain the hegemony of the dollar. Yeah that makes sense. plausible explanation because it's hard to see how the twenty billion alone could could shift anything but except as a signal of future of future action that it was a signal to calm the markets. And we've seen a lot of policies in the last few weeks that were designed to calm the markets. The pretensions that negotiations were in place when they weren't. And now we have a swap line. So there's a stream of announcements and decisions that are merely designed to stop bankers and you know investors from panicking. So that is a plausible, I would think a plausible, a very plausible explanation. It doesn't make me any calmer, but it might it might uh m make Wall Street calmer. Well folks, I think that I get the hunch that Wolfgang wants to talk more about this war and maybe to prognosticate uh uh its impact. So don't go anywhere. In the second part, Wolfgang is going to be talking to us about what he thinks this war is turning out to be . Welcome back to the Econoclasts. Wolfgan , talk to us about this war. How do you see this panning out? Well, the honest answer is I haven't got the forgiest, but uh uh let's let's start from there. What we do know is that the scenarios we discussed even a few weeks ago, like you know, baseline scenarios. The IMF talked about it, baseline scenarios, adverse scenarios, severe scenarios . We're already no longer in the baseline scenario. That's that's for sure. The baseline scenario was a scenario where things would take a while, maybe five weeks, maybe ten weeks at most, and where the world would reset back just the status quo enough it would have an impact, like you know, disruption always does, but it wouldn't be a permanent impact, it would be a limited impact. We are no longer in that scenario. Uh, because the impact we know is going to be uh gonna be permanent because Iran has made permanent destroyed oil installations, gas installations, it destroyed some fifteen percent of Qatar's gas uh processing uh plants. That's fifteen percent of gas off the market. This is a permanent damage. Permanent in the sense from the perspective of markets, because it will take years to repair. Oil fields have been damaged. Oil fields are also damaged in the Ukraine-Russia war. So the a lot of the the wars we're seeing right now, you know, produce real damage. So the idea that we will return to a status quo, the status quo unter isn't just a cheap oil price. The status quo unto was a cheap and declining oil price because we've seen very benign energy developments in the last three years that allowed central banks to cut interest rates. We're definitely no longer in that scenario. We can say that for sure. And that is the baseline out of the window. But we also have to think about the politics of this. Um you know, we always thought and Trump is you know, through his very manic tweets, uh assured us that there will now be a diplomatic solution. You would be sending his this envoys, you know, he's first sent JD Vans a few weeks ago, last weekend he was supposed to send Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and uh Steve Whitkof, his envoy to the Middle East. And Kushner and Whitkof ultimately didn't travel. You know, Trump pretended that this was because he held them back, because he didn't see any point of the negotiations. But the fact was that yeah, the Iranian foreign minister went to Islamabad in Pakistan, uh had a very short meeting and went back, and there wasn't going to be a conversation . There wasn't gonna be a talk. Iran has produced a paper, the US has re rejected that paper. Trump pretends there is another paper out there that's much better. We we've seen this, we've heard this all. The whole point is, and this is kind of connects to the to our previous conversation about the the swap lines, the whole point is to keep the market sweet, to keep us sort of in the belief, oh yeah, there's something is happening, there may be a deal next week. But frankly, if you look at the uh at what's happening at the difficulty the Iranians also have to agree their position and there are power battles playing up in Iran. We're not close to a deal here. We're certainly not close to a deal that would satisfy the or would tick the box es that the US would want. I mean the the two boxes is there has to be some some security about you know the nuclear fuels that we can't just you know let uh end this war and leave Iran and just completely in charge. There would have to be some supervisory mechanism at least agreed. Interesting that the Iranian foreign minister is now en route to Moscow. So it's quite possible that Russia plays a role in this in this particular issue. And the other issue is the supervision of free uh traffic through the Strait of Homoose and Iran right now wants to become a toll booth operator as people always say, charge ships or tax ships for each ship for for um you know for passage. The US cannot conceivably agree to that. It would be it would not only be humiliating, it would also have n serious knock on effects. Indonesia's already touting the same, doing the same in the street of Malacca , uh, which is an even more important maritime sea route than the Strait of Homuse. So you know, you would create precedents that would be very costly for the for the rest of the world. So this is a genuinely complicated situation. Diplomatic solutions take time to evolve. It's not like people meet and agree. It's not like the EU. You know, we've seen this with a loan to Ukraine. It took like six months of very difficult diplomacy to get that loan on the road. This is an even more difficult procedure where there are no procedures in place. I mean this is this is the government of Pakistan acting as a diplomatic interlocutor. But you know, Iran and the US do not are not in direct negotiations. There are not many open channels between the two. This is difficult. And once a deal is agreed, it will take a lot of time to put this together in detail because agreement at the political level is not the same as agreement at technical level. And once the technical detail is agreed, then it will still take time, months, not weeks, months, until shipping companies and insurance companies are happy. We could be looking at the end of the year, even under a relevant So if I take the IMF's pre uh you know way of thinking about this in terms of baseline adverse and severe scenarios, and they they had they put different forecasts on each one of them, we are definitely deep inside the adverse scenario. The severe scenario is still some way off. The scenario is one where the world economy is actually in recession. That would be very severe indeed, possible, but severe. And I'm not predicting that. So I'm not predicting anything, but I do know that the the more benign world we are no longer in that world. Donald Trump made a huge error in uh beginning this war, and he made an even larger error, uh very quickly after that, uh in not declaring victory and getting the hell out of there. Uh I remember when we're discussing it in the first few days of the bombardment of Iran. We were saying that exactly that, that this was a mistake, but he could always do a Donald Trump and say, oh well, we have one and go home. That would have cut his losses. Uh once he ade that second error and he stayed uh stuck in the uh in the quicksand of what is turning out to be uh an impossible strategically war for him, then he became a hostage to his own uh neocons, to his own warmongers, uh within the Pentagon, within his own administration, Marco Rubio, and so on. And the result is that, you know, he's now adopting this strategy of okay, I'm not bombing, but I am going to be blockading the blockade of Hormuz, in other words, continuing the pain that is being inflicted on his allies, the Gulf states, Japan, and of course the European Union, and also his own base in the United States, who have to pay through the nose, what, it's six dollars per gallon now, which is a preposterous by American standards, given the impun ity of um the people who elected him in the United States. And I agree with you, now he seems to be prolonging this. This this is now becoming a midterm, if not a long-term, strategy. Because the you know the Iranians are simply not going to accept anything which is less favorable to them than the deal that they got from Obama in 2015. And it will be a great defeat: spiritual defeat, propaganda defeat, discursive defeat by Trump, to go back to something like the Obama solution deal that he tore up once he was elected in twenty sixteen. So I think that you're right. I think this is going to go on and on and on. The repercussions will be multiple at different levels. Uh I think the hegemony of the dollar has never looked flimsier than now. You have uh electrification going at a galloping speed everywhere, everywhere, except maybe except in the United States, but that's to the detriment of the United St ates. Africa, Asia are going to move much faster towards being coming electoral states. That is detrimental to the policy of the Trump administration, which is to base the American hegemony on fossil fu els, and it has awful effects on the European Union. Not just in terms of boosting the cost of things, the cost of energy, at a time when uh we are already the doldrums of uh stagnation, uh both in terms of investment and in terms of economic activity. But also politically, Wolfgang, I want to raise again the example of my country of Greece. Because I think it is really important. Yesterday, Manuel Macron was in office. And it was clear that there was a strain with the Mitsutachis government, even though even though ideologically there as one. Because the Greek government being under the influence of the Trump ists, and in particular the new ambassador here to Athens, they forged a deal with Chevron and Exxon Mobil to create this perpendicular corridor that takes American fract uh gas and oil that comes to Greece all the way from the United States in containers and L G vessels and channels that energy towards Central Europe, towards Romania and towards Ukra ine. Now this is the plan to which the Greek government has become party to. In a Europe where politicians like Mac ron are supposedly particularly worried about dependence of the United States and interested in decoupling from the Trump administration's energy policies and decoupling from the hegemony of the United States. That's at least in theory what Macron is interested in. So you can see that you know we used to have a north-south divide in Europe, then we we had a east-west divide. Now we have a divide between those who like the Greek government who are totally sold to the Trump administration and other countries in the European Union that are trying to move away from that. So we have a combination of economic stagnation, of inflation, of the loss of any kind of dynamism, and the political fragmentation that the continuation of the Iran war is bringing to Europe. I agree with you. The Europeans are in a mess on on on this. And I think we put we will talk about the European response I'm sure uh many times from now on . What really changed uh in this in this war and where there were y as you mentioned there were turning points in the beginning. I think the blockade, the blockade of the blockade was an important turning point because that drew him further into the war. You know, I mean I remember in the beginning one of the conversations we had at the early, you know, earlier that when when I said there's sort of a logic of war that people, you know, that it's actually quite rare for people to declare victory and move out, even for someone like Donald Tr ump. People want more and more and more. And you see this with Putin. He, you know, he had the successes and then he wanted more in the belief that they can, you know, they will they will be invincible. And that is usually a mistake. Um, and you see this. in Iran The blockade commits him to a long standoff. It is not something that he can unilaterally abandon without l loss of faith. Uh so he needs to actually secure a deal. Iran doesn't have um an interest in this deal. So the blockade can only work. And that's the logic behind it. The blockade can only work if Iran becomes so desperate for money because Iranian ships cannot pass through the the the strait either. That we're basically entering into a blinking contest in in which Iran would lose or would panic. That may happen, that may not happen. So far the Iranians did not appear to be the kind of uh warriors who would just, you know, cave in at the first sign of ad adversity. They're very tough and they play dirty. They have new technologies, uh they play by other rules . They're willing to incur significant damage uh in in the in the region. People originally thought that the Iranians would be m more you know restrained in their attacks on uh the um Gulf So a lot of assumptions we made about Iran were wrong, and a lot of these assumptions were also made inside the US administration. So there were political misjudgments heaping on po political misjudgments. And I think that is that is you know definitely one of the consequences. Important point you raise is you know also in our first conversation is de-dollarization. I've always been a dollar skeptic. Uh you know, not in the sense that I fail to recognize the dollar's role as a global international currency. Of course I do. You know, I do I know the numbers and uh, you know, I no longer believe that the euro will take over from the dollar either. But I cannot see that a currency that if governments act the way the United States acts, that people will trust that government's currency for the number of transactions for reserves in the way they do. You know, the US accounts in purchasing power terms for some fifteen percent of world GDP. It's approximately the same as the European Union. We have fairly small parts of the global economy in terms of what money buys, which ultimately is the most important metric. There's no reason why 60% of global financial flow s should be accounted for by the dollar and the remaining twenty by the euro. We're both punching above uh our weight in the dollar massively above above their weight. So yeah, I'm not surprised to see the Hu an becoming a a more important global currency. There are limitations to which to how far this can go. China still hasn't capital controls. So it won't be, you know, it won't be we won't see an explosion of Ram bi landing. But you know, I can certainly see divers ification across across regions. I can see also diversification through other forms of savings like cryptocurrencies, gold and and commodities and other and other forms of investments, but not so focused on the United States. Especially now that this sort of global economic deal that we had, that, you know, America was responsible for all the innovation and that's why it made sense for us to you know put our savings into America and, you know, take part in the growth, all that is sort of likely to end as well, given that that too is now diversifying globally. This is a profound moment, you know, this Iran war and we always thought the f global financial crisis was the pro profound moment of you know the early part of the century. But maybe that wasn't the case. Maybe it is this this war because it is the the moment. I mean there you know there are sequence of events, but this this is possibly the moment uh where US hegemony ends. Well you know uh I still think that two thousand and eight was the game changer. I think two thousand and eight was the moment when the financialization which was necessary, essential, in the creation of the hegemony of the dollar based on American deficits. That's a great oxymoron of the second post-war era, the era that begins with the end of Bretton Woods. That the United States becomes more hegemonic the more into the red it goes. And on the back of that, the flip side of that was financializ ation. And that reached its um waterloo, I should say, uh, in two thousand and eight. And since then, the writing has been on the wall. Since then, we had uh various responses to try to maintain that system. Quantitative easing was part of that, that created other malignances that you and I have talked about. And of course, you know, something would come that would effectively make it abundantly clear to all of us that that period is over. And I think you may be right. The Iran war may be what really helps the penny drop in our minds. The Chinese don't want to replace the dollar with a one. What they want is to uh to be free, to be liberated from the power of the United States government to sanction them and to stop them from making payments. So my view is that uh they will uh strengthen the role of the one within the BRICS plus nations without trying to uh replace the dollar. And the result is we're going to have a multipolar world, which uh may be very messy and may may be very warmongering and um um the opposite of peaceful. But uh American hegemony seems to me clearly on the wane. Yeah, I agree. I agree. And I think the Europeans will probably go in a in a similar direction, uh, probably more hesitantly. But there's now certainly a recognition that you know excess reliance on the United States is not in our interest, especially access reliance on the on the US for defense, but also on the US for finance. The US administration is willing, keeps on using the dollar for sanctions, for secondary sanctions. They discovered it as a very powerful tool in foreign policy, but it's a tool that exhausts this usefulness uh the more you use it. Because yes, it is a very powerful tool in the short term and you really you can really coerce people to do what you want. But if you keep using it, you actually m uh you know get countries to uh reduce their dependence on the US dollar. And y we're seeing this happening and we're seeing this you know in the BRICS. We have blockchain-based technologies that can replace other types of transaction uh media payment systems. The EU if they're smart, not sure they are, but if they are smart, they could introduce a digital currency. You know, as we progress and as as we diversify, the power of anyone's jurisdiction in the world to impose itself in the way that the US has done will diminish. So I think you know that will probably be an upshot of this and I think you know historians will probably come to see Trump as a politician who accelerated America's decline. There's an awful a lot of sort of discussions in in in our world about things going back, like Brexit, you know, or we have to undo Brexit, or we have to go back to we were in the seventies or eighties. This is, you know, the world doesn't work like that. We will move on. We're not gonna return to globalization when Trump is gone, to the age of capital, the you know, the the age of financial crisis and quantitative easing. That you know there may be some mostly economists who think this was a good good period. But you know, I don't think it was. And it set us up for Trump, it set us up for the Iran war. It set us up for the Russia Ukraine war. It set us up for a lot of uh things that happened in that period. So we're not gonna go back to this. We're gonna move forward into a new area. And I think that area what what is foreseeable at this moment and you know stuff will intrude as it always does, but what is foreseeable is that it will be less US-centric. The US will still be a very powerful nation, but it will not be the country that can impose its will on the rest of the world through the financial markets. On this week, that is proving terrible for American hegemony and for economic orthodoxies. We bid you farewell until next week. And don't forget to rate, like, and subscribe to the Econoclast .