Cliff’s notes: Belgian King Leopold II convinced countries that he would take Congo for humanitarian purposes and also implement free trade. He focuses on rubber production and forced local populations to meet production quotas. If you did not meet your quota, they took your hand. If you didn’t meet it again, they’d either take another body part or take a body part (heads were not unheard if) of one of your children. Millions were murdered. But King Leopold II and Belgium got a lot of money so it was all worth it in the end, right? /s
That was a good episode but it is also very outdated at this point since it is over 7 months old now. The reason nobody was buying it was indeed because the government had set a rate that was completely out of whack with its actual value and they implemented exchange controls to stem the outflow of foreign exchange reserves to put up the appearance of legitimacy. Milei removed the capital controls though and floated the currency. It was expected to free fall and it has. Milei is a far right nutjob but a pegged currency to encourage investment followed by exchange controls has never worked out for Argentina.
Because that would fail very quickly. The CFA franc works because France dominated their exports. The euro took a long fucking time to make work and took a lot of planning and market integration. Even then it has some struggles.
brICs has very little market integration. While many of them do a good chunk of trade with China, it’s often not very even. Essentially it would be China dictating monetary policy which also ties itself to US monetary policy via a floating peg. There is also no freedom of movement between most of them. Without that, countries can very easily fall into a liquidity trap and be forced to deflate because of capital flight. As bad as the PIIGS financial crises were, they would have been significantly worse without people being able to move away from the countries.
It’s not even a cohesive group. It was some dude at Goldman Sachs seeing a few countries grow quickly and even then it was more like brIC since Brazil and Russia saw growth only from resource extraction. South Africa decided they wanted to be part of the show despite shit growth and it became BRICS. They don’t do that much trade with each other and now outside of China, their growth is shit. If they want to become more economically integrated, go for it.
There is a reason Poland’s defense spending has ballooned to over 4% of GDP. By comparison the US spends a little over 3% of its GDP on its military and most EU countries are closer to 2%.
You use rumble, you watch neo Nazi accounts on there (peacedozer), you are into conspiracy theories, you are anti immigration, and you think shit from George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party, is interesting. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
If you are somehow not a neo Nazi, you are going to want to do some serious self reflection. You yourself may not be a neo Nazi but the company you keep is fucking filled with them.
OP recently posted a rumble video to shit made by the founder of the American Nazi, George Lincoln Rockwell. Considering their seemingly anti immigration stance, you can probably guess their politics.
Those changes they push through are not likely to be good for workers and the general public. They push them through because they help their own profit. Them being able to do that fast is actually a negative.
Of course they are doing robots. Japan was founded on the idea that the country would eventually be run by robots and kaiju. Their kaiju progress is sorely lacking.