Category: ENGLISH

Measures taken by EU governments ostensibly to ameliorate the impact of high energy prices on consumers are not only insufficient, but wittingly criminal. Family rebates and tax reductions on gasoline prices just ensure handsome gains for financial speculators. When Italian Minister Roberto Cingolani speaks of a “colossal fraud”, he might be ignorant of how pricing mechanisms work, but the European […]

On March 23, Deutsche Bahn (DB) was forced to halt transport of rail freight for several hours, because the supply of electricity — the company manages its own power stations — had collapsed to such an extent that there was no capacity available to operate non-passenger trains. Logistics firms that manage rail freight had received no pre-warning, and their association […]

German Economy and Climate Protection minister Robert Habeck (of the Green Party) has put the national emergency plan on gas supplies in a pre-alarm stage. That plan includes three levels: pre-alarm, alarm and emergency. The first includes the establishment of a working group that monitors the situation and can decide to cut energy to some end-consumers. However, in order to […]

While Western leaders were involved in emergency discussions last week on imposing their “rules-based order” worldwide, spurred by the last-minute visit by U.S. President Biden to Europe (cf. above), intense diplomacy was also being carried out in Asia in a very different perspective, reflected in the packed agenda of China’s State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi. It confirms that […]

Liu Zhiqin, a noted Chinese economist at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, in an interview with CGTN’s Tian Wei on March 23, was asked to comment on the global economic effects of the U.S. sanctions regime on Russia. He noted that it “has already been estimated that the spread of COVID will lead to conditions of starvation for 200 […]

On March 23, one day before President Biden left for emergency discussions on war with NATO and EU leaders, followed by a trip to Poland, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told the press that while the United States has “not changed our nuclear posture to date,” President Biden “will be consulting with Allies and partners on that potential contingency”. […]

The Schiller Institute will hold an international online conference on April 9 in the late afternoon and evening (Central European time) focused on the urgency of establishing a world order of peace that takes into account the legitimate aspirations for security and development of all nations. The invitation to the conference notes that: “The present war in Europe, the succession […]

On March 18 Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden held a two-hour phone call, their first since November, long before the Russian military operation was launched in Ukraine. In the meantime, many of the consensus items agreed upon by the two Presidents in November have not been followed up in practice by Washington. The call this time […]

The Biden Administration’s decision to freeze Russian central bank reserves has been seen by many as an historical shift, marking the end of the dollar-based global monetary system. With that decision, the U.S. has defaulted on the obligation of a paper currency, and all countries in the world are drawing the lesson accordingly. They will diversify their reserves away from […]

The strength of the 1945-1965 Bretton Woods System, LaRouche wrote in 2000 in the above-mentioned essay, lay in the fact that the “U.S. dollar’s strength as a reserve currency, was based upon the assurance that the current obligations against the U.S. dollar would be matched by the combination of an export-surplus plus gold bullion at a standard, fixed price for […]