many tried to explain why USD hegemony stays on. a bigger puzzle is perhaps why the US has not decayed like 17th-C Spain while it controled the world money -- American silver. Hamilton, Vilar, Keynes detailed how Spain's control of world money actually led to its decline.. 1/7



while sitting on pile of silver from the mysticized silver mountain in Potosi, Spainish elite used the American silver to purchase luxury and manufactured goods from other countries; idle rentiers dominated & drowned out productive & entrepreneurial class... 2/7

a brilliant paper arguing the USD hegemony is grounded on US geopolitical power, as 3/4 of safe USD assets are held by govts with military tie to the US. hence weaponizing USD via sanctions won't jeopardize USD hegemony. the problem of this analysis is...🧵

gov't with military ties with US are defined by formal alliance pact including countries that are actually tyring to drfit away from the US, like Argentina and Brazil. these alliances won't prevent them from joining de-dollarization attempt when real alternvatives emerge...

revisiting 16th-c Confucianism via 20th-c New Confucianist reconstruction from Mou Tsung-san to Tu Weiming etc. many of them are more interested in the Wang Yangming school of Confucianism, which developed anti-authoritarian and anti-collectivist thoughts & actions.. 🧵 Tu's dissertation is on WYM, whose theory on union of knowledge & practice, populist position on "everyone can be sages" thru individual reflexivity without instruction of estabished authorities made many compare him to Martin Luther and liberal philosophers in Europe....

in the late 1970s when the Khmer Rouge's atrocity became obvious, he attacked the refugees for making stuffs up to discredit the revolutionary regime to please western journalists and officials hostile to comrade Pol Pot. it is beyond delusional.

https://twitter.com/AlexKokcharov/status/1652588346491666432

just one example here.

https://twitter.com/hofunghung/status/1351649120965033985

//the Bank of Russia...explains that Russian exporters and importers suffer from currency risks when settling their trade in the non-convertible and volatile renminbi. ...there are not enough derivatives for traders to hedge the Chinese currency.// asiatimes.com/2023/04/rmb-ba… //The central bank says Russia has been selling renminbi since the beginning of this year.... in exchange for Western currencies.//

not sure if any idiots i blocked here are personas created by these agents. if so their works are pretty lousy. justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/3… the evidence presented in the complaint is just amazing. even including photos of the agents at work in the midst of harrassing one particular victim online (shown in the redacted screen)?? how do they get the photo?

whenever sino-western relation gets tense, some become nostalgic about the western respect of China among the Jesuits and early Enlightenment thinkers. they long for a revival of their admiration. but many of the +ve images of China back then were distortions and lies.... 1/9 🧵 the Jesuits said Confucius texts were full of teaching about a monothesiestic God so Confucianism was Christain in nature. they said that to ensure continuous financial support of the Church and royal courts for their missionary works in China.. 2/9

in 1975, HKU student union called for all HK ppl to boycott the Queen's visit, saying the visit was an insult to all Chinese in HK. nobody got arrested and penalized the union president at the time was Mak Hoi-wah, who later... became a social worker and professor, and HKG appointed him to be a District Councilor in 1982. He was a founder of the HK Democratic Party. He was arrested, charged and sentenced at age 70 last yr for organzing the annual vigil commemorating June 4.

1/6 There is still a lot of talk about Russia shifting to the yuan so the sanction will only advance international use and status of the yuan vis-a-vis USD. This is seriously misplaced.. 2/6 Russia-China trade did undergo de-dollarization over the last decade, but mostly through switching to euro. Russia has been running trade deficit with China (who doesn't?). Basically Russia uses the euro they earns in selling stuffs to Europe to pay for China imports..

1 of 4: lots of talk about Russia and other countries will start shifting away from SWIFT to China's CIP system. The CIP system is a yuan-based system. To shift to CIP significantly, you need to have major settlements in yuan and accumulated lots of yuan first.... 2 of 4: But yuan is not freely convertible and it won't be in the foreseeable future. So the only use of having lots of yuan in your hands is pretty much to buy stuffs from China, if Chinese exporters start to accept yuan instead of USD payment in larger scale....