Daily Archives: May 9, 2021

Over decades, if not centuries, the US dollar has been the worlds leading currency. The central banks all over the world hold an enormous part of their investments in the US currency, while some private companies use it for international transactions. With this, the trade in US treasury has boosts the American economy and greases the wheels to the global financial system.

But, many experts predicted a tipping point will come that would cause the dollar to collapse, thus lead to a global economic problem. In this scenario, many investors would rush to other currencies to run off further losses. This would mean a breakdown of the national economy. The aftermath of this scenario could likely lead to a dollar collapse.

What is Dollar Collapse?

Full of sudden currency collapses have happened in history. A dollar collapse is characterized to a long-term depression in economic activity, increased poverty and a disruption of the social order. One of the primary roots of any collapse is the lack of confidence in the stability or efficacy of money to serve as an effective store of value or medium of exchange.

The main sign of a dollar collapse is when the value of US dollar drops. There are some conceivable scenarios that could cause a sudden crisis for the dollar. When there is a great threat of high inflation and high debt, in which rising consumer prices force the government to raise interest rates.

If the US entered a steep recession without dragging the rest of the world with it, anyone who holds dollar-denominated assets might sell them at any cost that includes foreign governments and no one wants to buy them, worst would leave the dollar. Thus, anytime, everyone should prepare for the worst, but you can prepare for a dollar collapse through these economic indicators.

If US dollar collapse happens, it might come to pass. No one would predict it. Thats because the signs of forthcoming failure are difficult to see. It is imperative for the government to take a necessary intervention to bring an economy back from collapse. Yet, this can often be slow to remedy the problem.

US Currency is weakening

When US dollar weakens, it suggests an adverse financial effect. A weaker currency would encourage exports and make imports inflated. This would mean decreasing a nations trade deficit over time. Every business will have a certain degree of effect depending on the increased price of goods and services.

A weak dollar can boost the gross domestic product during an economic recession. Because exported goods cost less, foreign buyers buy them in greater amounts. It can also result in higher inflation expectations and higher commodity prices. Furthermore, it could lead the Federal Reserve to react and tighten monetary policy.

The emergence of China and Europe Economy

The emergence of major foreign holders of US treasuries is a potential factor to a dollar collapse. Nonetheless, the US dollar must be quite resilient to bar this kind of occurrence.

The Risk of Growing Government Debt & Central Banks

According to the Federal Reserve and U.S. Department of Treasury,

foreign countries costs over trillion dollars of debts like China (about $1.17 trillion) and Japan (about $ 1.06 trillion) held the highest percentages as of January 2018. It appears that central banks will do its power to save the situation, but remember that central banks can also lose control. This situation would be very demanding for the government with high debt loads.

A dollar collapse suggests an economic plight. It is akin to deep recession that scarcity and shortage of resources would occur. One must prepare for the worst scenario and to respond to this kind of uncertainty, you must be mobile. Here are few ways to prepare and protect yourself and survive a dollar collapse.

1. Prepare your Finances and Start being Smart with your Money Now.

You start with cutting all unnecessary expenses and spend that money to pay down your debt. The possibility of losing your home to debt collectors is a very real prospect.

An Emergency Fund is a potential aid to prepare for financial troubles. It will give you stress-free during hard times. It can provide you with a fund to buy last minute supplies once things start to go bad.

Remember to always have a cash on hand. When things go wrong, there is a very real possibility that the banks may freeze your accounts. Its important to have cash that is accessible, either from a savings account or a cash box in your home. This can drift you over in an emergency until you can access money in your emergency fund.

Now is the perfect time to buy long-term supplies that you will need to survive in the future.

Start stockpiling food and long-term supplies. In any type of crisis, especially during a collapse, food, water and long-lasting consumables are essential and indispensable. You will likely see main supply chain shortages and problems, making these types of supplies one of your most important pre-collapse concerns.

Put together a supply of first-aid & medical supplies on hand. Once you create a kit, in the event of a collapse, you may not be able to shop for these supplies, sots important to have them on hand.

3. Secure your Home

To prepare for a dollar collapse is to choose your shelter type. A separate shelter is designed to survive from natural disasters or man-made weapons or attacks. During this kind of crisis, power systems may fail and robbers and scavengers may threaten your home. Take precautions to protect yourself and your home.

Another thing is to create two sources of electricity. One source could be solar. Hook it up to your home and then run the system underground. The second source might be an underground generator. You will use this in the event of a total loss of power. Keep your energy sources hidden underground to protect them.

Set an alarm system in your home. Home alert alarm systems are easy and inexpensive to install and maintain. Wireless security systems notify you if a trespasser is approaching your home. Hidden cameras allow you to see internal and exterior areas in your home where a trespasser may be present.

One of the prevalent risks youre going to face during dollar collapse is the threat posed by people. Learn everything you can about self-defense. When things go bad, you are going to need a way to protect yourself and those you love, your home.

Make sure that every member of the family is mindful of the situation. To prepare for a dollar collapse, you need have to guarantee that your whole family is ready with your preparations. This means informing them in honest terms what is about to happen and telling them what they should be doing. It is important that everyone takes the situation . Otherwise, they will not be mentally prepared in the event that collapse happens.

Each family member must be informed of the steps you have taken to prepare your finances, essential supplies, food, and shelter. Instruct them on doing the same.

Every member should understand the relationship between inflation and economic growth. Explain to them the adverse impact of a dollar collapse on your familys socio-economic life.

Consider including other family members, neighbors, or a community group in your preparations. Make sure that these are people who are reliable and will put to work for the benefit of the group.

5. Equip your Mind

Even more important than supplies, is survival knowledge and awareness. Knowledge is the key to your survival, and now is the time to get plenty. During any kind of crisis and survival, including a dollar collapse, knowledge is going to be your most powerful ally.

Read books on survivaland preparedness, then start collecting information on how to live a more independent lifestyle.

Do your own research and dont rely on government spun stories, or crafted in the media; you need to do your own research too. Check the reliability of the information you get to prepare for the collapse.

6. Expect a Financial Crisis

The major risk you are going to face in a dollar collapse is the downturn of your finances. It is important to be ready beforehand on what to do and what not to do on your financial systems.

Check and track the price of commercial commodities. Changes in the prices of commodities affect the countrys economy and the value of the US dollar. An increase in commodity prices is associated with an increase in inflation. Increased inflation correlates with economic growth. But, if commodity prices drop, inflation slows, which indicates an economic decline.

Take note of the financial markets. Big ups and downs in the markets are a red flag signaling a general decline.

Watch the oil prices. When oil prices increase, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) goes up too. Remember that the fluctuation of oil prices has a macroeconomic impact. If it is increasing, then the value of goods and services also increases.

Everybody else could tell that a dollar collapse would be coming. A sudden dollar collapse would create global economic depression. It would allow the US government to come up with a currency system and a kind of economic strategies to avoid grave consequences.

Demand for Treasurys would drop, and interest rates would go up. US importprices would skyrocket, causing inflation.

Irregular public services like school system experience frequent strikes that shut them down, power issues and outages become more frequent.

Unemploymentwould worsen and more people will experience job loss or layoffs. More people are displaced and finding a job will become almost impossible.

An increase in criminal activity will definitely happen. People will become desperate to feed themselves and their families and more people will be more willing to cross the line into criminal activity to get what they need.

Lots of people will lose access to their healthcare when they lose their jobs. Healthcare appointments may become more difficult to schedule and it may take longer to get in to see a doctor because more people are getting sick and need care.

You can expect increased incidents of domestic violence as family relationships are strained and crack under the stress of poor living conditions.

A dollar collapse is a real threat with far-reaching repercussions. While it is inevitable, there are advance preparations that individuals and their families can make, at the very least, protect themselves from the event triggers. Stay informed on top of the global economy. You can be safe in a dollar collapse if you follow the ways that protect you from an economic crisis.

central banks, debts, Department of Treasury, dollar collapse, economic crisis, economy, Federal Reserves, financial crisis, inflation, recession, survival, triggers, unemployment, US government

Read more from the original source:

Dollar Collapse Predictions: What Will Happen When It Happens?

FAIR LAWN, N.J. On Tuesday, May 11 at 7:30 p.m. (ET), join historians mit Kurt and Dirk Moses for a conversation on Kurts new book, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province.

If genocide, as a practice that includes murder and plunder, is orchestrated by a central authority but implemented at the local level, Kurt asks, what is the relationship between local and central authorities? What are the incentives and motives that leads to mass participation?

In his new book, Kurt challenges the depiction that state-sponsored genocide in all its dimensions could be carried out by the central government by edict and, instead, examines how local actors and even ordinary Muslims are complicit.Umit Kurt

To borrow from former House Speaker Tip ONeill, Kurt shows how all genocide is local and invokes Donald Bloxham and Moses observation that location tells us much about the political calculus underpinning genocide.

Kurt and Moses will examine how primary sources from Armenian, Ottoman, Turkish, British, and French archives, as well as memoirs, personal papers, oral accounts, and newly discovered property-liquidation records together provide an invaluable account of genocide at ground level.Dirk Moses

Kurt a historian of the modern Middle East, with a research focus on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, specializes in the late Ottoman socio-economic history, Armenian genocide, mass violence and interethnic conflicts. His broader training also includes the comparative empires, population movements, history of the Ottoman urban and local elites, wealth transfer and nationalism. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of History at Clark University. He is a former post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University, the current Polonsky Fellow at Jerusalems Van Leer institute and teaches in the department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

See the rest here:

The Armenian of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province with mit Kurt and Dirk Moses - The Armenian Mirror-Spectator

A key feature of climate change is that it doesnt pose one single risk. Rather, it presents multiple, interacting risks that can compound and cascade. Importantly, responses to climate change can also affect risk.

In our highly connected world, climate risks and our responses to them can be transmitted from one system or sector to another, creating new risks and making existing ones more or less severe. In many cases risks cannot be understood without considering these interactions.

Recent evidence indicates how some of the most severe climate change impacts, such as those from deadly heat or sudden ecosystem collapse, are strongly influenced by interactions across sectors and regions.

For example, global warming of 2C is projected to reduce yields of staple crops by 5%20%. The compound interaction between heat and drought can make the risk to crops more severe. In response, global trade networks that link distant food systems together can help compensate for reduced local food security. But they can also create new risks, such as more rapid spread of disease, pests and invasive species. And new threats to local food security can arise from commodity price spikes caused by policy responses to climate shocks elsewhere.

Limiting global warming will reduce risk to crop yields. Yet the response actions selected to achieve this will also affect risk. For example, planting forests might displace food crops.

Analysts often treat physical climate risks and transition risks (mitigation and adaptation) separately. Yet policymakers face these risks simultaneously. A holistic view of climate change risk considers them together. It also considers how multiple risks interact.

So how can these complex risks be assessed? In a recent article, we propose three steps. The first is to recognise mitigation and adaptation responses as potential drivers of increasing or decreasing risk. The second is to identify how the multiple drivers of risk interact. The third is to pinpoint how multiple risks can aggregate, compound and cascade.

Typically in climate change assessments, risk is considered as a combination of three components hazard, vulnerability and exposure. This is the approach used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to date.

Take a simple example. Extreme heat (the hazard) poses a risk to rail infrastructure through its heat tolerance (its vulnerability) and its location (its exposure).

But responses to climate change also affect risk. Look at local biodiversity, for example. Planting trees could be as great a threat to habitat loss as drought itself. And tree planting and drought can interact to increase risk of intense wildfire, further harming biodiversity.

Some decisions can have negative unintended consequences, but some can have multiple benefits. For example, switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy will limit global warming and prevent millions of premature deaths caused by air pollution. A more unified risk framework recognises how this happens.

At the moment, risk assessment tends to focus on interacting climate hazards, especially extreme events such as concurrent heat and drought, or heavy rainfall coinciding with a storm surge to increase likelihood of flooding.

This physical science focus on compound extreme events needs to be integrated with greater attention to compounding drivers of exposure, vulnerability and responses.

For example, interactions of gender, age and race can increase risk of illness and death from extreme heat. The risk compounds when low-income workers spend more time working outdoors and are more likely to live in hotter parts of cities.

Understanding compound exposures, vulnerabilities and responses is therefore critical to climate justice. Mitigation and adaptation responses also interact. City trees, for example, reduce urban heat islands and energy use from air conditioning.

Climate risk assessment also needs to consider interactions between multiple risks.

Risks can compound, cascade and aggregate with others. Compound climate risks are those where two or more risks interact with each other to change the overall severity of risk. For example, risk to human life from tropical storms can compound with risk to life from COVID-19 in evacuation centres. A cascade is when one risk triggers many others. For example, tree death from drought affects health and property through wildfires, then river ecosystems, property, and human life from landslides. Aggregation occurs when risks with unrelated causes including those not directly related to the climate occur simultaneously. For example, if an area is hit by an earthquake and a drought at the same time.

Take Cape Towns drought as an example, which peaked in early 2018. Effective responses to the drought were delayed by the political risk of declaring a disaster and a lack of feasible water supply alternatives.

Responses became increasingly urgent when it seemed that the city of four million people might run out of water. This risk was expected to cascade, affecting health, economic output and security. Responses by different groups interacted to generate risks to municipal finance, as households used less water.

The interactions among risks matter because they can increase (or decrease) the overall level of risk. And the resulting overall risk may be very different from the sum of the individual parts.

Understanding the interactions among risks has the potential to change the way we respond to climate hazards.

Policymakers may worry that a response is riskier than the physical climate risk itself. This can delay action. Integrating responses into the way decision makers look at climate change risk helps make scenarios clearer.

Its also important to incorporate local and traditional knowledge and sustainable management practices. Understanding local social and ecological systems can help inform response options.

Our framework aims to strengthen assessment of complex climate change risks by clarifying the types of interactions that generate risk and where they originate. Assessments like this will better reflect the real-world challenges of managing risks across interconnected environmental, socio-economic, and political systems.

Link:

Climate change risk is complex: here is a way to assess it - The Conversation CA

The results that Popular Party (PP) candidate Isabel Daz Ayuso secured at Tuesdays Madrid regional election represent a crushing victory, which serves to continue the hegemony of her group in the region while at the same time revolutionizing the national political outlook. The importance of the result calls for an effort to understand exactly what happened. It is by its nature a complex phenomenon, with a number of factors that contributed to the win.

It would seem reasonable to point to the following points: Ayusos ability to connect with a wide-ranging feeling of pandemic fatigue, as well as the powerful craving for work activity and social interaction; her tapping in to the deep-seated rejection of the politics and alliances of Prime Minister Pedro Snchez that are felt among the electorate in the Spanish capital; the establishment of a campaign framework that was polarizing and anecdotal and favored her interests; and her ability to take advantage of the collapse of center-right Ciudadanos (Citizens) without making any mistakes.

It appears more than probable that a desire to punish the national government was a mobilizing factor

At the forefront, it is undeniable that Ayuso managed to read perfectly the fatigue with the pandemic and make use of the weariness of a society that is utterly exhausted of the tough restrictions and lockdowns that have been in place due to Covid-19. This understandable human instinct appears to have superseded the rational nature of the restrictive measures. Madrid is an exception on the continent in terms of its lax policies for controlling the pandemic. It is debatable as to whether the right balance has been found, but without a doubt, the approach has found support among the public. This understanding of the hopes of overcoming the pandemic could well be the key to this widespread support at the ballot boxes, which has widened Ayusos support.

Secondly, it appears more than probable that a desire to punish the national government was a mobilizing factor. To start with by the sectors that have been most affected by the coronavirus restrictions, but also, in generic terms, there is hostility among a large sector of the Madrileo electorate toward Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Snchez of the Socialist Party (PSOE), as well as former deputy prime minister and Unidas Podemos candidate for Madrid premier Pablo Iglesias. Contributing to this, no doubt, was the negotiations that the PSOE-Unidas Podemos coalition government has entered into with pro-independence parties such as the Catalan Republican Left and Basque nationalist group Bildu in order to pass legislation in the Congress of Deputies, where the government lacks a working majority.

Ayusos strategy of direct conflict with the prime minister has been effective. The initial involvement of Snchez in the Madrid election campaign and the direct participation of Iglesias as one of the candidates strengthening a framework that favored Ayuso brought a particular essence to this factor.

Confrontation and other skillful strategies during the campaign allowed Ayuso to avoid focus on questions of management during the two years she was Madrid premier, something that was less favorable for her than the fields of ideological confrontation, ambitions, and the demonization of the other candidates (including excesses such as the claims of links between Iglesias and Venezuela).

It is undeniable that Ayuso managed to read perfectly the fatigue with the pandemic and make use of the weariness of society

This is another important area that requires reflection. The success of the PPs candidate can be partly explained by her unusual style of leadership, which falls somewhere between entertainment and politics, and has garnered a large amount of popularity, as well as allowing her to reach outside the usual political conversations. This tactic has diverted attention not just from specific issues and future political projects, but also from corruption cases affecting the PP.

Ayuso has obviously been able to soar thanks to structural reasons that have nothing to do with her, such as the slow-motion political suicide that Ciudadanos has been committing for some time now, and of course the history of the PP itself in the region it has held power in Madrid for more than 25 years. This presence in the institutions has allowed the PP to mould the region in accordance with its ideological preferences, not just in relation to a particular culture but also a segregated social structure (Madrid has among the worst socio-economic segregation in schools in OECD countries). This connection between Madrid and the PPs political projects has now deepened to the point where there is now a focus on a regionalist populism, the progress of which will have to be monitored.

While all of these strategies are successful at the ballot box, they raise important questions regarding the implications that they will have in terms of polarization, the impoverishment of political discourse, and even in terms of confrontation between regions. But they also have implications for those parties who are still unable to read and express what their voters are going through in a very acute way.

English version by Simon Hunter.

See the original post here:

Madrid elections: The keys to Ayusos victory - EL PAS in English