China calls time on dollar hegemony

You can date the end of dollar hegemony from China's decision last month to sell its first batch of sovereign bonds in Chinese yuan to foreigners.

Beijing does not need to raise money abroad since it has $2 trillion (£1.26 trillion) in reserves. The sole purpose is to prepare the way for the emergence of the yuan as a full-fledged global currency.

"It's the tolling of the bell," said Michael Power from Investec Asset Management. "We are only beginning to grasp the enormity and historical significance of what has happened."

It is this shift in China and other parts of rising Asia and Latin America that threatens dollar domination, not the pricing of oil contracts. The markets were rattled yesterday by reports – since denied – that China, France, Japan, Russia, and Gulf states were plotting to replace the Greenback as the currency for commodity sales, but it makes little difference whether crude is sold in dollars, euros, or Venetian Ducats.

What matters is where OPEC oil producers and rising export powers choose to invest their surpluses. If they cease to rotate this wealth into US Treasuries, mortgage bonds, and other US assets, the dollar must weaken over time.

"Everybody in the world is massively overweight the US dollar," said David Bloom, currency chief at HSBC. "As they invest a little here and little there in other currencies, or gold, it slowly erodes the dollar. It is like sterling after World War One. Everybody can see it's happening." Read more
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The demise of the dollar

Ed: Read also this

In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, Russia, Japan and France – to end dollar dealings for oil, moving instead to a basket of currencies including the Japanese yen and Chinese yuan, the euro, gold and a new, unified currency planned for nations in the Gulf Co-operation Council, including Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait and Qatar.

Secret meetings have already been held by finance ministers and central bank governors in Russia, China, Japan and Brazil to work on the scheme, which will mean that oil will no longer be priced in dollars.

The plans, confirmed to The Independent by both Gulf Arab and Chinese banking sources in Hong Kong, may help to explain the sudden rise in gold prices, but it also augurs an extraordinary transition from dollar markets within nine years. Read more
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Four words no man should ever have to say – Harriet Harman is right. But only about topless models

Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, and even Harriet Harman speaks sense once in a blue moon - in this case when she mocks that British institution, Page Three.

I’m not a big fan of the St Paul’s Girls School-educated Minister for Equality, whose brand of second-generation feminism makes fundamentalist Mormonism seem rationalist in comparison. I also think she represents more than anyone else the political caste’s betrayal of and disgust for the working class.

But, anyway, she’s right about the topless models on Page Three of the Sun. Read more
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The two policewomen and OFSTED

The creeping invasion of the state into what was once the preserve of the family and the individual – the databases, the intrusive checks, the inevitably disastrous attempts by bureaucrats to engage in social engineering through the promiscuous use of shoddy legislation and lazily-devised "initiatives" – has become so much a feature of modern life that most of us no longer notice it. Until the day it comes knocking at the door.

For Detective Constable Leanne Shepherd, that day was Friday July 10 of this year when an official from the Office of Standards in Education (Ofsted) called at her home in Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire. A CID officer in Thames Valley Police, she was enjoying a day off with her daughter, Edie, just two-and-a-half years old, when the bell rang.

“She was really lovely, the Ofsted lady,” remembers DC Shepherd. “She said there was a report that I was child-minding illegally. When I asked her what she meant – was I committing a criminal offence or something - she said she wasn’t 100 per cent sure.”

DC Shepherd’s alleged "crime" – and even in the age of the nanny-state-gone-wild, this takes some beating – was to have embarked on an arrangement with her friend, colleague and job-sharing partner, DC Lucy Jarrett, by which they took turns to look after each other’s daughter during days off. It was, according to both women, a “perfect” arrangement that lasted more than two years and allowed them to pursue challenging careers part-time (they conduct investigations together), and spend sufficient time with their first-borns in the years when they needed their mothers most.

There was no rigid pattern to the arrangement – its virtue was its flexibility – but it was reciprocal: each woman received a benefit in the form of two, and occasionally more, days of free child care during most weeks of the year. This supposedly violates the Childcare Act of 2006, which prohibits adults not registered as child-minders looking after other people’s children for more than two hours a day for reward – the reward being the free care. Read more
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Let the decent citizens reclaim our streets

All the crime figures over the past 50 to 100 years show how anti-social disorder has gradually taken over. In my constituency of Birkenhead, there are now more violent crimes against the person than there were in the whole country 50 years ago. When I first started campaigning in Parliament against anti-social behaviour there were too many unruly youths in Birkenhead, but I didn't come across more than six "families from hell". Now the Prime Minister puts the total at 50,000 across the country. This is a national emergency, and it is time for the Government to empower decent citizens to reclaim the streets.

At present, the neighbourhood can go into court and get a warrant issued against these low-level community terrorists. But because this is deemed a private action, the police will not enforce the warrant to bring the thugs into court that day. The bench must be given power to rule that neighbourhood-inspired action is a public action, and to enforce the warrant immediately. This would, for example, have allowed Fiona Pilkington's neighbours collectively to have protected her family and themselves. It is a reform that could be enacted in 10 days' time, when Parliament returns, and at a stroke would change the balance of power in favour of decency.

We must also address the fact that our country is increasingly losing the knack of producing good parents. In short, we need a government that believes in turning out good citizens as seriously as did our Victorian and Edwardian predecessors. Only then will the fight against the evil forces that destroyed Fiona and her family be made more equal. Read more
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