Brazil’s president has blasted the monstrous role of the US dollar in the global economy during a formal visit to China after the two nations forged a recent pact to replace the dollar with their own currencies in trade deals.
"Why should every country have to be tied to the dollar for trade? Who decided the dollar would be the world's currency?" asked President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at a Thursday ceremony in China’s largest city and global financial hub, Shanghai, to inaugurate his political ally Dilma Rousseff as president of the New Development Bank set up by the BRICS member nations -- Brazil, China, Russia, India and South Africa.
"Why can't a bank like the BRICS bank have a currency to finance trade between Brazil and China, between Brazil and other BRICS countries? Today, countries have to chase after dollars to export, when they could be exporting in their own currencies," added visiting Lula, who is currently touring China aiming to further expand ties with his country’s top trading partner.
The 77-year-old president, who is due to meet with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing on Friday, intends to reposition Brazil as a global go-between and deal broker, spreading a message that "Brazil is back" as a key player on the global stage.
Lula’s administration declared last month that China and Brazil had reached a deal to trade in their own currencies, ditching the US dollar as an intermediary.
Under the currency deal, Brazil and China named two banks – one in each country – to conduct their massive trade and financial transactions by directly exchanging yuan for reais and vice versa, rather than going through the dollar.
China is Brazil's biggest trading partner, with a record $150.5 billion in bilateral trade last year.....more below
The recently-released tranche of additional documents tied to Jeffrey Epstein include remarks by a woman identifying as one of the victims of the late disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker, in which she refers to Donald Trump as a witness to the killing and disposal of the body of her infant.
The US Department of Justice released the documents numbering tens of thousands, which include FBI tips and complaints implicating Trump, on Wednesday.
Reports emerging on Friday across various outlets, including the UK edition of American online newspaper The International Business Times, pointed to inclusion in the documents of an FBI intake form dated March 3, 2020 recording a complaint from the unnamed woman.
The complainant said she had been trafficked at age 13 in the early 1980s and described an incident in 1984 involving the killing of her newborn child aboard a yacht in Mona Lake, Michigan.
According to the document, the woman said her uncle had carried out the killing and disposed of the ...
This year silver has been on the greatest bull run that we have ever seen. It is up an astounding 166 percent since January 1st, and so those that purchased it long ago and stuck with it are really loving life right now. When the price of silver reached the 50 dollar mark earlier this year, I thought that it would be some time before it hit the 60 dollar mark. But of course the truth is that it didn’t take long at all.
Once the price of silver reached 60 dollars, I thought that it might hit 70 dollars some time in early 2026. If you check the latest numbers, you will see that we have easily blown past that threshold, and the price of silver has already surpassed 80 dollars in Shanghai. I know that I have been using the word “crazy” a lot lately, but without a doubt what we are witnessing at this moment is truly “crazy”.
So why is this happening?
In a previous article, I discussed factors such as the AI boom, strong industrial demand, new technologies and a spike in demand for physical silver in Asia....