According to the Wall Street Journal, the UAE’s central bank chief raised the idea of a currency-swap line with Treasury Department and Federal Reserve officials during meetings in Washington, D.C., last week.
To be sure, the UAE has plenty of money, including $270 billion in foreign-exchange reserves and trillions of dollars across its sovereign wealth funds.
BANGKOK (AP) — China’s role as an unofficial mediator in the latest war in the Middle East is drawing attention across the world as it seeks to project the image of being a responsible global power while U.S. actions are straining its long-standing alliances.
China’s profile in international diplomacy has risen in recent years, thanks to active efforts from its diplomats. Long reluctant to get involved in conflicts far from its borders, it has nevertheless emerged as a major player with attempts to mediate conflicts from Southeast Asia to Europe.
With the Iran war, Beijing is not an official mediator, but all parties — including Washington and Tehran — say it has played an important role in trying to de-escalate the conflict.
Experts say Beijing’s strategies for diplomacy in multiple conflicts have looked similar and have had mixed success in influencing negotiations, but the efforts come at an opportune time, as U.S. actions under President Donald Trump have increased tensions with traditional diplomatic allies.
In the Iran war, experts say, China’s close economic and political ties to Tehran put it in a unique position of influence as the conflict hurts the global energy supply, especially in Asia.
Putin explains his partnership with Iran on nuclear energy development and his efforts to ensure protection of Israel too if Israel agrees not to harm Russian nuclear workers in Iran:
Leavitt said Iranians were begging for talks. 4 hours later Tasnim called bullshit. Day 57 of a 6 Week War: A Slum-Flipping Ghoul, a Ferret-Faced Bribe Receipt, & a Haunted Big Mac Walk Into a Hotel
So today the property developer and the property developer fly to Islamabad, ordered by the bankrupt steak salesman, to attend a meeting Iran has publicly said isn’t happening. The Iranian Foreign Ministry told the world’s press, on the record, that this is a Pakistan-Iran bilateral and that Witkoff and Kushner can sit in the lobby and order room service. Two failed property developers being ghosted by a country whose economy they’re supposedly strangling. And Karoline Leavitt will get on Fox News tonight and call it productive. Productive. The favourite word of every man who’s just been stood up.
This is the diplomatic infrastructure standing between the world and an oil shock that is going to make 1973 look like a fart in a wind tunnel.
Here’s the part nobody in power is telling you. The smart money is bracing for it in private and refusing to say it in public.
The global economy is about to eat itself.
Scott Bessent told AP this week that Iranian oil production starts shuttering in 2 to 3 days. That’s not a forecast. That’s a calendar. When Iranian production goes offline you don’t just lose Iranian barrels, you lose the marginal supply that keeps the entire system in equilibrium. Saudi spare capacity is a fairy tale nobody on the trading floors believes anymore. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a husk. US shale is not the swing producer it was. The math does not work. The only thing keeping crude in check is a hopium cocktail of “ceasefire any day now” headlines that the smart desks stopped believing in February.
Look at gold. It’s not moving like that because retirees in Florida discovered chains. Sovereign wealth funds are buying. Central banks are buying. China, India, Russia. Anybody who can read a balance sheet and a satellite image is buying because they know what’s coming. The dollar’s reserve status is being euthanised in real time and the men at the BIS in Basel are sweating into their Swiss tailoring.
Hormuz insurance is no longer functioning. Lloyds is quoting numbers that are basically polite refusals. Reinsurance is gone. Every barrel that does come through carries a war-risk premium that gets passed to the refiner, the wholesaler, the trucker, the farmer, then your kitchen table.
US farmers are already on the canvas. Trump’s 2025 tariffs destroyed export markets that took 30 years to build. China stopped buying soy. Brazil ate America’s lunch. Mexico retaliated. Diesel hit 4 dollars a gallon and stayed there. Fertiliser doubled. Bankruptcy filings in the corn belt are at Carter-administration levels. The American family farm is being systematically liquidated by tariff policy and energy shock simultaneously, while the man in the White House promotes a meme coin.
When Iranian oil shutters next week, diesel goes to numbers that end farms. Not hurt. End. The combine doesn’t run. The fertiliser doesn’t get spread. The seed goes in late or not at all. Then the bank calls. Then the auctioneer comes. The consolidator buys at 30 cents on the dollar. That’s the bedtime story USDA economists are telling each other behind closed doors and refusing to say in front of a microphone.
Australian farmers are next. Same diesel chain. Same fertiliser chain. Same gas that we export at giveaway prices and buy back as urea at 10 times the rate. The wheat belt, the cattle stations, the dairy farmers already being ground into pulp by Coles and Woolies, every one of them about to discover the tractor cost tripled, the feed cost tripled, the freight cost tripled, and the gate price didn’t. Farms fold. Towns hollow out. The supermarkets mark up 40 percent and pretend they’re absorbing the cost. The politicians blame “global factors.”
The global factors are two property developers in a Pakistan hotel being ignored by Iran on the orders of a haunted bankruptcy notice in a too-long tie.
The smart leaders know. Japan is stockpiling. South Korea is stockpiling. India never stopped. China has been stockpiling since 2022 and could feed its population for a year if the world burned tomorrow. Europe is fragmented and half-arsed. America is doing nothing because the man in charge is selling sneakers and Bibles.
Not one head of government will go on television tonight and tell their people the truth. The truth is that the global financial system, the just-in-time supply chain, the cheap food, the cheap energy, the cheap credit, the entire 80 year post-Bretton Woods party, is being held together right now by the hope that two failed property developers can talk an Iranian foreign minister out of his own leverage in a Pakistani hotel suite.
They can’t. He won’t. The Iranians have time, leverage, a populace battle-hardened by 45 years of sanctions, and an opponent whose entire strategy depends on Karoline Leavitt telling Fox News fairy stories that get fact-checked into the ground before sundown.
Every day this drags on, the cost compounds. Diesel ticks up. Fertiliser ticks up. Freight ticks up. Insurance ticks up. Yields tick up. Spreads widen. Some marginal borrower defaults. The bank wobbles. The regulator panics. And somewhere in Iowa or the Riverina a man with 30 years of dirt under his fingernails reads the bank letter and puts his head in his hands.
That’s the world Witkoff and Kushner are flying into today. Not as fixers. As accelerants. Two failed property developers, one bagman and one failson, taking orders from a malignant orange tumour in a too-long tie, carrying the global economy in a briefcase and not realising the briefcase is on fire.
The smart money is bracing. The dumb money is buying the dip. The farmers are reading the bank letter. And the Iranians are pouring tea.
TACO forever. Until the dam breaks.
And an extract from a view from an American (Michael Corthell, Substack) :
In Trumpism, the rhetoric is supposedly about law, order, patriotism, and national restoration. Yet beneath it runs a recurring appetite for domination. The outsider must be punished. The dissenter must be silenced. The press must be discredited. The courts must be subordinated. The election is legitimate only if the movement wins.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
borderslynn 