The death of the dollar?

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Sunday, August 23, 2026 15:35
VIEWED: 15891
PAGE 9 of 15

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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6IXSTRINGJACK:
It's even more than that though.
We in America are beneficiaries to the fact that the REAL PTB based their whole empire off of the USD.

SIGNY: Only true to a certain extent. Bill Gates for example has moved his wealth into more durable assets: farmland and the Svarlsbaard seed bank. Others have moved their assets into stocks. Others are in the Euro or the yen. USD makes up a large part of reserve currency but something else makes up the other 40-45pct.

SIX: Yes. But it's still the base, and even amid the current volatility of everything, it's still the most reliable asset to hold onto. This is by design.

In other words, it's not a Bug that the rest of the world is suffering from inflation, recession and financial turmoil at the same time that America is. It's a Feature.

Now unless they have a particular gripe against the US that they find so irredeemably egregious that they have no choice but to switch currency, think of the logistics involved in that. TPTB wouldn't want to make a move so drastic and with such unpredictable results unless they knew full well that they had complete control over the outcome from the get go. And as you've illustrated above, any attempt at middle-management "leaders" trying to do so on their own ends up with their cities being turned to rubble.

People the world round can say all they want about the weakness of the US Military, but all that is is talk. Our military dwarfs the rest of the world's military and gets larger and larger cash infusions nearly every single year, and despite that fact it does practically nothing but "exist".

Incidentally... Screw NATO. If it weren't for the fact that it would trigger WWIII, the US Military could invade Russia today and turn Moscow to rubble by the end of the weekend if it were directed to. But TPTB have no interest in owning a world that is on fire.

SIGNY: I can't imagine how. The first thing any invading nation does is wipe out the target's air defenses: radar stations, air bases, air fleets, communications, satellites and AWACS-tyoe planes, anti-aircraft batteries. Then they can go to town with command centers, fuel depots, military bases, munitions, etc and, finally, send in the troops.

But Russia has powerful air defenses. And where does the USA launch this attack from?? Yes, we have bases across Europe, but the total number of USA troops in Europe is about 90,000. https://news.yahoo.com/explainer-how-many-american-troops-are-in-europ
e-134927726.html it would take a lot more than that to invade Russia. And Europe is already scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of weapons to send to Ukraine.

It took GWB six months to assemble the 500,000 men he thought necessary to invade Iraq. We wouldn't be allowed the time -or the convoys necessary - to invade Russia, since Russia has very capable anti-ship missiles. So unless we're willing to go nuclear, the idea of conquering Moscow is just a dream.

SIX: None of these were/are real wars. I mean REAL wars that have large amounts of human casualties on both sides.

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There were massive casualties in Iraq and Libya. To them, they were real wars.

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I'm not arguing that. To them it was a real war. To us it was newspaper headlines until we became numb to them and then they'd move on to the next thing like Hurricane Katrina or Michael Jackson's death.

That's why I said massive casualties on both sides. But since these are wars that we The People have no interest in fighting, there would have been a revolt if they started sending in our kids and young men to die like they did in WWII. Particularly after the shitshow illegal wars in Viet Nam and Korea.

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SIX: Most people living today have not seen the actual might of the US Military. All we've been witness to is theatrics.

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WE haven't seen a real war since the Civil War, since none of the other wars we

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THG

Sunday, March 12, 2023 4:03 AM

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Apparently TWO banks collapsed this week. Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was the bigger one, and also one called (IIRC) Silvergate.

According to a vid I listened to, both banks got caught on the wrong side of the Fed's interest rate increases. SVB specialized in venture capital funding. Silvergate was the real world interface between cryptocurrency and dollars, exchanging crypto for dollar and vice versa.

Both were cash rich. What they did was put their money into 10-year Treasuries at low interest rates "back then", but when interest rates rose the value of the Treasuries fell. Faced with a surge in withdrawals (in the case of Silvergate it was the drop in crypo prices, I don't remember what happened to SVB) they had to sell their Treasuries at a loss, which shook the confidence of depositors and shareholders and led to, in essence, bank runs. If they had a been allowed to hold their Treasuries to maturity all would have been well; it was a mismatch between long term assets and short term demand.

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Trump Era Roll Back of Bank Regulations Resurfaces Amid SVB Collapse

Amid the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), some commentators have claimed a Trump-era rollback of financial regulations may have contributed to the situation.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/trump-era-roll-back-of-bank-re
gulations-resurfaces-amid-svb-collapse/ar-AA18vuPe?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=9605bdd61a2c4c0abec275770545fd22&ei=143

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T

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
The Woke took full advantage of that VC while it was available and destroyed any value that their portion of it had.

Between that and GPT, all of those millennials and old zoomers with their fancy college degrees are going to be put out on their asses where they belong. With no skills of any value to fall back on.



They'd better hone those beggar skills if Mommy and Daddy don't let them move back in.

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6ix, there was $175 billion in that bank. How much was lost? $15 billion. The depositors will get back around $160 billion. 6ix, you write as if the depositors lost all $175 billion, which strongly suggests you are a nincompoop about how banks work.

The real losers are the SVB stockholders. The price per share was $284.83 on March 6th. By March 9th the price was $106.04 when trading was halted. That price could go to zero. Their loss could be another $6.28 billion. Losses for individuals depends on when they bought their shares because the price was as high as $727.79 in 2021. Very poor investment for some who bought at the peak.
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/SIVB:NASDAQ?authuser=0&window
=MAX

Some $175 billion in customer accounts were taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which is now tasked with returning money to the bank’s customers. $91 billion worth of Treasuries (a usually safe investment) that the bank bought with customers’ deposits, had lost some $15 billion in value due to interest rate hikes.
https://time.com/6262009/silicon-valley-bank-deposit-insurance/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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This is the MSN article

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Amid the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), some commentators have claimed a Trump-era rollback of financial regulations may have contributed to the situation.

While largely unknown outside California's Silicon Valley tech corridor, SVB has for decades been a go-to financial institution for the country's technology and health start-ups. One of the 20 biggest banks in the United States, it had over $200 billion in assets by the end of last year, according to CNN.

As of Friday, however, SVB was left in freefall as clients began a run on the institution, spurred on by higher interest rates and other factors, resulting in a spiraling chain reaction that has threatened to sink the institution and leave its customers in financial jeopardy.

In the fallout of Friday's run on the bank, some reports noted that a rollback of banking regulations by former President Donald Trump might have weakened SVB's ability to manage risks associated with interest rates. In 2018, according to The New York Times, Trump signed a bill that axed regulatory requirements for regional banks with less than $250 billion in assets.

Under the new rules, such institutions no longer had to submit to "stress testing" by the Federal Reserve and were no longer required to keep a certain amount of cash on hand to protect against the effects of financial shocks, the newspaper reported.

The Times noted in its report that the bill was championed by SVB CEO Greg Becker. Becker had pressed lawmakers in Congress to lessen regulation that placed higher scrutiny on certain banks, claiming that SVB had a "low risk profile of our activities and business model." By 2018, his bank had spent roughly $500,000 to lobby for the changes that Trump ultimately signed into law, according to The Lever, an investigative news outlet.

The rules rolled back by the bill were first introduced in 2010 by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, a sweeping reform law signed by former President Barack Obama

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in place of re-instituting the more meaningful Glass-Steagall Act, axed by Bill Clinton in 1999.

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to address issues in the financial sector in the wake of the 2007-2008 global financial crisis and the Great Recession. As noted in a tweet on Saturday from businessman and former Obama economic adviser Robert Wolf, the Dodd-Frank Act originally required banks with over $50 billion in assets to submit to stress testing.
1999.
As of Saturday afternoon, Trump has not commented on SVB. Newsweek reached out to his communications team via email for comment.

In the wake of the run, California regulators shut down SVB and turned over control of it to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). It has since been reported that the bank had not employed a chief risk officer in the months leading up to Friday's collapse and had not insured roughly 90 percent of its deposits.

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Unless someone forensically audits SVB and applies "stress testing" to its balance sheets, we will never know if "stress testing" would have saved the bank.

But this bank failure is not the death knell of the dollar. If anything it's more of an indicator than a cause of financial disturbances. The value of the dollar is going to be determined by much larger factors- America's total debt load (government, corporate, individual, financial) and money issuance, whether there is anything of value behind the dollar, whether other nations will continue to trust a "weaponized" dollar, and whether other nations will find an alternative for trade. And if they do, whether choose to torpedo the dollar suddenly or just let it sink on its own.

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Unless someone forensically audits SVB and applies "stress testing" to its balance sheets, we will never know if "stress testing" would have saved the bank.

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Bullshit from you, Signym. We already know that the bonds the bank held dropped in value by $15 billion, a loss large enough to bankrupt the bank: "$91 billion worth of Treasuries (a usually safe investment) that the bank bought with customers’ deposits, had lost some $15 billion in value due to interest rate hikes."
https://time.com/6262009/silicon-valley-bank-deposit-insurance/

We already know why the bank purchased too many bonds. It is as easy as 1,2,3:

1) SVB’s president, Greg Becker, pushed for weaker banking regulations, telling congress to lift “enhanced prudential standards…given the low risk profile of our activities,” as The Lever reported. Two former staffers for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy are registered lobbyists for Silicon Valley Bank, with one specifically lobbying on the 2018 Dodd-Frank repeal law that experts say made this crisis more likely.

2) House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who himself pushed for the repeal of significant pieces of the landmark Wall Street reform legislation known as Dodd-Frank. “We’re going to move this Senate bill directly to the president’s desk to ensure these reforms help the economy to grow further by making community banks stronger,” McCarthy said of the legislation in 2018. “This is going to free up a great deal of capital and this will help a lot.”

3) A chief culprit, economists say, is legislation signed into law by President Trump in 2018, which rolled back key parts of the Dodd-Frank banking regulations passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

“This was a 100 percent avoidable problem,” economist Dean Baker told The Intercept in an email, pointing to the Dodd-Frank repeal bill. “That bill raised the asset threshold above which banks have to undergo stress tests from $50 billion to $250 billion. SVB would have been required to undergo regular stress tests before the revision; among the stresses you look at are sharp rises in interest rates, which is apparently what did in SVB. Presumably, if its books had been subject to this test, the risk would have been detected and they would have been required to raise more capital and/or shed deposits.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20230312035036/https://theintercept.com/20
23/03/11/silicon-valley-bank-used-former-mccarthy-staffers-to-weaken-regulations-lobby-fdic/

Signym, the situation is absolutely simple to understand, unless you are obfuscating because you are a crook or because you don't know what you write about.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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