Paul Craig Roberts - 2014 Will Be A Year of Reckoning for the USA
Former US Treasury official, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, warned King World News that 2014 will be a dangerous year of reckoning for the United States. Dr. Roberts also warned a collapse is coming that will be so powerful it will overrun the Exchange Stabilization Fund and other measures now in place by central planners to protect against such catastrohic market events. Below is what Dr. Roberts had to say in this remarkable interview.
Dr. Roberts: “The people who are saying that the Ukraine crisis will cause a flight to safety and a rise in the dollar’s value are overlooking the main impact of the crisis in the Ukraine which comes from Washington’s threat of sanctions against Russia. And the Russian government replied to this threat by announcing that they were simply leaving the dollar-based payment system....
“If they (Russia) are not in that system, sanctions cannot apply to them. So they have announced that they have entered into a barter trade with Iran to take 500,000 barrels of oil, and they are going to sell this oil for rubles, gold, or for the currencies of their BRIC trading partners -- China, India, Brazil and South Africa.
So here is the actual first event of the dollar being abandoned as the currency of international settlement. Considering that the Russian energy business is vast, it implies a substantial dent to the use of petrodollars. So the demand for the U.S. dollars in foreign exchange markets in order to pay energy bills is going to take a huge hit -- it’s going to decline.
And this will put downward pressure on the exchange value of the dollar. It could also start a stampede. You could see other energy producers saying, ‘We are also going to accept payments in different currencies, or in gold. This would really hit the dollar’s exchange value in the foreign exchange market so hard that I don’t think the various stabilization programs would be able to support it. It would also unleash a (much) stronger demand for gold. This would also break the Federal Reserve’s ability to keep rigging the gold price.
So I would say that the year 2014 could be shaping up as a year of reckoning for the United States government, particularly with regard to the dollar. The (U.S.) administration, when it attempted to bully Russia by threatening sanctions, I really think it has undone the dollar.”
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Paul Craig Roberts' full audio interview. It's well worth listening to. (opens in .mp3)
