Conference Report, Panel 2: Replacing the Dollar-Based System Is Good for the U.S.

There was a great deal of agreement among all speakers at the conference on the need to replace the current, unjust economic order, with its rapidly growing inequalities. EIR editor Dennis Small presented the Schiller Institute’s new “LaRouche Plan for a New International Economic Architecture,” and discussed the potential of how it could be implemented – since the trans-Atlantic powers refuse to do so — by the so-called “Strategic Triangle” countries , China, Russia and India. They have 38% of the world’s population, they produce 42% of its wheat, 66% of its steel, and so forth. But they will have to forge an agreement on fixed exchange rates among them and a barrier of capital and exchange controls between their new currency arrangements, and the dollar. Above all, as Lyndon LaRouche stressed, a new monetary agreement rests on the credibility of their intentions jointly to create credit and direct it to higher physical economic productivity in the near-term and generations-long future.

This was strongly reinforced by the presentation of Justin Yifu Lin, formerly World Bank chief economist. He explained that China has long understood that it was obliged as a major economic power to contribute to world development, and intended to do so through the existing international institutions (IMF, World Bank, etc.). But as they failed over decades to move any significant number of low-income nations to medium-income, or medium-income nations to high-income status, China decided to launch its own infrastructure projects and to offer many others to developing countries in the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Chinese-American businessman George Koo argued that the dollar-reserve system is in fact moribund now, because “the sanctions taken by the Biden Administration have put the full faith and credit of the United States is put into doubt”. Only a small fraction of nations in the world joined these sanctions, and even before the Ukraine war there was movement away from the dollar as a reserve.

This particular subject led to a lively discussion. EIR’s Dennis Small clarified “the speculative dollar that the Russians and the Chinese and Indians and everyone is trying to separate themselves from in self-defense” is not the American currency. This is a London-based “speculative financial instrument that the United States of America should also separate itself from.” The U.S., Small urged, should join with the Belt and Road Initiative, break with the London-based dollar “and re-establish our own greenback dollar; a US currency. That’s what the Glass-Steagall legislation is all about. So, this is not something that needs to be hostile to the United States, quite the contrary. This is in the best American tradition.”

Two leaders of one of Colombia’s national trade unions, CTU USCTRAB, Pedro Rubio and Fraydique Gaitán, described how their country and all of South America could be benefit from the infrastructure projects, such as the Belt and Road Initiative. The conference then heard from veteran Indian journalist Saeed Naqvi, who has traveled and reported from 110 countries, who described how the media over decades have become more and more polarized and untruthful. “When war breaks out, truth is the first casualty,” he quoted Aeschylos, as saying.