by John Rubino
Dollar Collapse
Think about this for a second. The people running the global economy decided it would be a good idea to extend supply chains over multiple countries so that everyone does the thing they’re best at (what economists call “comparative advantage”). One country, for example, mines lithium, another combines it with nickel and cobalt and many other things from many other places to make batteries, and then ships those batteries to multiple other countries where they’re incorporated into cell phones and electric cars. Costs are low (if you ignore the slave labor), inventories are just-in-time, and consumers are ecstatic. And the people who own the mines and factories get rich beyond their wildest dreams.
But then the same people who devised the above system decide that it’s also a good idea to punish countries that stray from the imperial orthodoxy by cutting them out of the global trading/banking system.