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ECONOMY
SANCTIONS ‘UNDERMINE HEGEMONY OF DOLLAR’, US TREASURY ADMITS
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen admitted to CNN that Washington’s unilateral
sanctions on countries around the world “could undermine the hegemony of the
dollar”.
By
Ben Norton
Published
2023-04-17
US Treasury building in Washington, DC (left); Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen
(right)
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The secretary of the US Treasury, Janet Yellen, has admitted that Washington’s
imposition of unilateral sanctions on countries around the world could weaken
the dominance of the dollar.
“There is a risk, when we use financial sanctions that are linked to the role of
the dollar, that, over time, it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar”,
Yellen said in an April 16 interview with CNN.
She also noted that Washington’s use of economic warfare “does create a desire
on the part of China, of Russia, of Iran to find an alternative” to the dollar.
Before serving as secretary of the Treasury, Yellen was the chair of the US
central bank, the Federal Reserve.
Her remarks represent a significant public acknowledgment by a top level US
government official that its increasing use of sanctions has fueled the growing
de-dollarization movement in the Global South.
Republican Senator Marco Rubio made similar comments in a March 30 segment on
Fox News, complaining, “We won’t have to talk sanctions in five years, because
there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar,
that we won’t have the ability to sanction them”.
In the April 16 CNN interview, Fareed Zakaria asked Yellen:
> The way that the United States has used sanctions often – in this case
> [against Russia], the case of the Iran nuclear deal – is to use the power of
> the dollar as the reserve currency of the world.
>
> But that weaponization of the dollar has produced a reaction.
>
> This week, President Lula in Brazil said, ‘Why are we all being forced to use
> the dollar?’
>
> Emmanuel Macron made reference to the dollar in that same way.
>
> The European Commission has talked about, after Trump pulled out of the Iran
> [nuclear deal], talked about creating an alternative to SWIFT, to the
> American-dominated payment system.
>
> Is there a danger that we will look back at all these measures and say, this
> was the moment that the dollar’s hegemony and its status as a reserve currency
> began to falter?
Yellen leads the Treasury, whose Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC)
oversees the US government’s sanctions.
She responded:
> There is a risk, when we use financial sanctions that are linked to the role
> of the dollar, that, over time, it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar,
> as you said.
>
> But this is an extremely important tool, we try to use judiciously and in
> circumstances, especially when we have the support of our allies.
>
> It’s not just the United States. It’s a coalition of partners acting together
> to impose these sanctions.
>
> So it is a very effective tool.
>
> Of course, it does create a desire on the part of China, of Russia, of Iran to
> find an alternative.
>
> But the dollar is used as a global currency for reasons that are not easy for
> other countries to find an alternative with the same properties.
>
> The US treasury market is the deepest, and most liquid, and safest asset.
> Dollars are widely used. We have very deep capital markets and rule of law
> that are essential in a currency that is going to be used globally for
> transactions.
>
> And we haven’t seen any other country that has the basic infrastructure,
> institutional infrastructure, that would enable its currency to serve a role
> like this.
Despite Yellen’s claim that the US government uses this tool of economic warfare
“judicially”, more than one-quarter of the global population lives in countries
that have been sanctioned by Washington.
Unilateral sanctions that don’t have the approval of the United Nations Security
Council, which is the vast majority of those imposed by the US, flagrantly
violate international law.
A map of countries sanctioned by the United States
SANCTIONS: A DEADLY WEAPON OF WAR, WITH MILLIONS OF VICTIMS
Western sanctions have caused millions of deaths around the world.
A former United Nations assistant secretary-general and UN humanitarian
coordinator in Iraq, Denis Halliday, resigned in 1998 in protest of the
devastation that sanctions caused in the West Asian nation.
“United Nations Security Council member states … are maintaining a program of
economic sanctions deliberately, knowingly killing thousands of Iraqis each
month. And that definition fits genocide”, Halliday stated in 1999.
“We are now in there responsible for killing people, destroying their families,
their children, allowing their older parents to die for lack of basic
medicines”, he added. “We’re in there allowing children to die who were not born
yet when Saddam Hussein made the mistake of invading Kuwait”.
The former top UN official estimated that sanctions caused between 1 million and
1.5 million Iraqis to die from malnutrition or lack of health care.
In a 1996 interview on 60 Minutes, former US Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright was asked about a report that sanctions caused half a million children
to die in Iraq. The top US diplomat replied, “I think this is a very hard
choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it”.
Since then, Washington’s use of the sanctions weapon has massively increased.
Illegal US sanctions caused an estimated 40,000 deaths in Venezuela just from
2017 to 2018, according to a study by the Center for Economic and Policy
Research.
The number of US government sanction designations grew from 912 to 9,421,
skyrocketing by 933%, in the two decades from 2000 to 2021, according to
economist Timothy Taylor’s review of OFAC data.
YELLEN IMPLIES US PLANS TO USE RUSSIA’S STOLEN FOREIGN EXCHANGE RESERVES TO PAY
FOR UKRAINE RECONSTRUCTION
In the interview with CNN, Yellen argued that the unprecedented Western
sanctions on Russia have been successful, causing a 40% drop in Moscow’s oil
revenue and leading to a substantial government deficit.
She also implied that the US and Europe want to use some of the $300 billion
worth of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves that they unilaterally seized in
order to pay for reconstruction in Ukraine – in what is essentially an act of
massive geopolitical robbery.
Zakaria asked if the money needed to rebuild Ukraine “should be taken from
Russia’s frozen central bank reserves”.
Yellen hinted that Washington would like to do so, but there are “legal
constraints”, stating:
> I think Russia should pay for the damage that it has done to Ukraine. So
> that’s a responsibility that I think the global community expects Russia to
> bear.
>
> This is something we’re discussing with our partners.
>
> But, you know, there are legal constraints on what we can do.
>
> We have frozen Russian assets, and we’re discussing with our partners what
> might lie in the future.
>
> But I think that’s the right thing to happen, that Russia should pay for the
> damages that it’s caused.
The US dollar was established as the global reserve currency in the 1944 Bretton
Woods Conference.
This same conference established the US-dominated World Bank and International
Monetary Fund (IMF).
This April, the World Bank and IMF held their spring meetings in Washington.
While these US-dominated financial institutions were meeting, however, the
developing nations in the BRICS system were strengthening their own alternative,
the New Development Bank, which is adding new members, expanding its operations,
and moving away from the US dollar.
> BRICS Bank de-dollarizing, promises 30% of loans in local currencies, new
> chief Dilma Rousseff says
TwitterFacebookWhatsAppTelegramWeChatEmail
In this article:Brazil, China, CNN, de-dollarization, dollar, Fareed Zakaria,
Iran, Janet Yellen, Russia, sanctions, SWIFT, Treasury
1 Comment
1 COMMENT
1. deschutesmaple
2023-04-30 at 05:22
Janet Yellen (age 76)…Joe Biden (age 80)…Nancy Pelosi (age 83)…Dianne
Feinstein (age 89)….Mitch McConnell (age 80)…Bernie Sanders (age 81)….Chuck
Grassley (age 89)…and the list goes on of geriatric, senile U.S. senators
and presidents who refuse to step aside and let younger generations lead the
country. Biden is 80 years old, and is obviously suffering from dementia due
to senility. Many of his interviews are nonsensical ramblings. He can’t even
do a press conference without a teleprompter! If he meets a foreign
dignitary in the Oval Office, he sits there, face down reading 3×5 cards to
his guest–not even making eye contact! He’s a friggin’ wreck. He’s easily as
bad as Ronald Reagan–who his cabinet almost had removed from office due to
his struggles with Alzheimers disease which entirely erased his memory
several years after his last term. Why, oh why is the USA being lead by a
bunch of senile old farts who can barely put together a speech or sentence
without a teleprompter; or a helper to guide them off the stage? Obviously
Biden is NOT leading the country as “president”: then who IS leading the
country? These old fuckers won’t step down. They MUST GO, they’ve had their
time; it’s now time to step aside for the good of the country, simple as
that and allow younger more lucid people lead the country. It’s like they
are so greedy that they don’t want to give up: they want to cling to their
power and hold the USA back from accepting that the fantasy of USA being the
world’s hegemon are over, and China, Russia, India, Brazil, etc want a
multipolar world without the US dollar as world reserve currency. But they
can’t accept this new reality: they will have to be dragged, kicking and
screaming into the coming multipolar world. Losers.
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