April 13—The elected leader of a very large country with a lot of resources posed a simple question today: “Every night I ask myself why all countries have to base their trade on the dollar. Why can’t we do trade based on our own currencies? Who was it that decided that the dollar was the currency after the [1971] disappearance of the gold standard?”
The speaker was Lula da Silva, the President of Brazil. He was speaking to a large roundtable meeting in Shanghai with the officials of the BRICS New Development Bank (NBD). He had just addressed the official ceremony marking the assumption of leadership of the NDB by his colleague, Brazil’s former President Dilma Rousseff. At the point that he asked, “Why can’t we do trade based on our own currencies,” he was interrupted by resounding applause from the Brazilian and Chinese dignitaries present.
Today was a day when the New Development Bank rediscovered its original purpose, to provide substantial development credit, free of IMF conditionalities, so that poverty can be eliminated, people fed, and countries develop all across the world. Lula had explained at the NDB ceremony: “The decision to create this bank” by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—the BRICS—“was a milestone in the joint action of emerging countries.” Then, in a deep understatement, but one that needed to be expressed, Lula explained: “Given their size, the size of their populations, the weight of their economies, and the influence they exert in their regions and in the world,” the five countries “could not remain oblivious to major international issues.”
He concluded that “the New Development Bank meets all the conditions to become the great bank of the Global South.”
If these developments weren’t enough to send the financial speculation world of London and Washington into conniptions, Lula also made sure to take a tour of Huawei’s facilities and speak with the Chinese about 6G developments.
Last week, there was a timely presentation made at the Moscow Economic Forum by physical economist Sergey Glazyev, addressing the secret of China’s formula to wipe out poverty, with a view to other countries, in particular his Russia, being able to replicate the success. He explained, in so many words, that there is no substitute for a society to examine the most fruitful ideas for qualitative scientific breakthroughs being placed at the center of policy-making, with a marketplace with regulations that harness and benefit from individual initiative for those central societal goals.
Glazyev, a serious student of Lyndon LaRouche’s physical-economy approach, displayed his new book, “The Chinese Economic Miracle: Lesson for Russia and the World.” The book’s ‘flyleaf’ description reads: “In the half century since Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening-up policy, China has made an unprecedented leap from deep backwardness to leading the world in terms of output and economic development. The population moved from the huts to the best cities in the world in terms of the quality of the living environment. Country roads have been replaced by high-speed rail and highways. From a predominantly agricultural country, with predominantly manual labor, China has become a world leader in the field of intellectualization and robotization of production… China is becoming a leader in the formation of a new world economic order.”
So, what are you doing April 15 and 16? Become a leader in the formation of a new world economic order, one that you can be proud of, one that you can tell your grandchildren about… one where you can have grandchildren. Because: “Without the Development of All Nations, There Can Be No Lasting Peace for the Planet.”
