Like, yeah, they can ‘get away with’ ending soft power. They can ‘get away with’ extrajudicial killings. They’re operating off of pure machismo right now. They’re getting drunk on their vices. They’re stripping masks where masks wouldn’t be advised to be stripped. I feel like I understand now that Fascism is, in part, an expression of weakness. They wouldn’t be doing this unless they were scared. It’s too volatile. It feels both too late on a power-level and too early on a popular-level. Never mind the ticking time bomb that is AI data centers. It feels like, and I’m sure this is cope, there is a timer on their ability to run the circus much longer.
My first instinct here is to doubt myself, intellectual pessimism and all. In that vein, maybe this is just revolutionary optimism, but we’re at the point where it feels like there is a palpable anger brewing in the basement. I don’t know. Maybe Palantir works as an anti-communist panopticon and we just death spiral forever. I don’t want to lose hope.
Just to correct a misconception here: there is no such thing as China dumping US assets. This has been the biggest Republican scaremongering about China and we don’t want to perpetuate it.
In order to sell an asset, you gotta have someone to buy it in the first place. The US dollar operates under a free floating exchange rate mechanism so if you try to dump a large amount of US dollars, and nobody wants to buy them at a rate that’s profitable for you, you lose.
In the past, this worked during the fixed exchange rate era because the central bank promised to convert the currency into gold or whatever metal/currency they are pegged to, and if you dump a huge amount of the currency at the same time, you’re betting that the central bank won’t have enough reserves of the gold/metal/foreign currency to defend their exchange rate. This was how Soros screwed with the Bank of England and the Thai central bank in the 1990s.
You literally cannot dump US assets today because it is not pegged to anything, so the Fed doesn’t have to defend the dollar exchange rate. Your best bet is finding a buyer stupid enough to buy from you at a rate that’s profitable for you, but the market players aren’t stupid (especially not the people/institutions/countries who can move trillions).