The real conflict between east and west is being fought with money, not guns. So why hasn’t China been able to dethrone the almighty dollar?
“Money makes the world go around” sang the incomparable chanteuse Liza Minnelli in her 1972 musical film hit Cabaret. The founder of the storied Rothschild banking dynasty said much the same thing nearly two centuries earlier but in words that have profoundly shaped the structure and power realities of the international financial system. “Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws,” opined Mayer Anselm Rothschild in 1790, a year before the establishment of the First Bank of the United States.
If Mayer Rothschild were alive today, he would immediately grasp this reality: the nation which controls the international capital flows that enable trade, investment, technology and lifestyles is king. That nation is the US, despite all the talk of its decline. What’s clear is that the US is moving to weaponise its financial power against autocratic challengers opening a new front in the developing cold war with Russia and China.