A few days, as reported widely in the news media, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said at a press conference that

We have lent huge amounts of money to the United States. Of course we are concerned about the safety of our assets.

To be honest, I am a little bit worried and I would like to … call on the United States to honour its word and remain a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets.

Those words, when translated into English in writing, sound bland. But if you watch what he said in full video in the original language, then you will be able to appreciate the immense gravity of the situation from the tone of his voice.

But dear readers, you must understand that Premier Wen was just stating the obvious. There’s nothing new in what he said. All you have to do is to turn back to what we wrote in December 2006 and read Will the US dollar collapse? and Awash with cash?what to do with it? to see the big picture of what’s going on for years. As we wrote back then,

Lately, we are again hearing that central bankers are murmuring about diversifying their foreign reserves away from the US dollar. Does it mean that there is an imminent liquidation of their US dollar reserves? Well, this is not the first time they murmured about it and it is definitely not in their (including the Federal Reserve?s) interest to see a collapse of the US dollar. The Chinese, with their US$1 trillion of reserves, would not want to see their stockpile of US dollars to lose significant value.

That paragraph was written in the final days of 2006. Today, China’s US dollar reserve had doubled from they had more than 2 years ago. The major difference between today and back then is the emergence of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).

Thanks to the GFC, the status quo, which had been running for decades, is stressed towards a breaking point (but who knows, perhaps that inevitable  breaking point could still be delayed for longer before an almighty snap happens). There are far too many contradictory and conflicting interests among nations.

For the US, as we said before in How is the US going to repay its national debt?, is facing a situation in the coming decades of having to pay a colossal amount of public debt. The public sector is facing a massive debt many times its GDP from the unfunded Medicare and social security liabilities. With the GFC, the US government is transferring more and more private debt to the public sector through bailouts, handouts and stimulus. It is either the US mobilise its monetary printing press to massively inflate away (i.e. print copious amount of money) all these debts or they face up to the reality that they are bankrupt and go through the cold turkey of an almighty deflationary collapse (read: almighty depression). If the US chooses the former, China will be furious because that will be doing the very opposite of what Premier Wen called on the US to do, namely to “honour its word and remain a credible nation and ensure the safety of Chinese assets.”

Unfortunately, the big problem is that the US (along with countries like Australia and UK) has been de-industrialising and hollowing out its economy for a very long time, while the China has been doing the opposite. To put it simply, the US is consuming more and more while China produces more and more. This gross imbalance has been playing out for too long. With the GFC, the US consumers are effectively bankrupt and cannot borrow any more to buy from China. China has lost its biggest customer and is in trouble too.

The coming G20 Summit will be filled with countries with conflicting agendas. The US (and UK) wants more stimulus (and of course, bailouts when required), which can only happen if they print money (i.e. devalue the US dollar), which is as good as spitting on China’s face. Europe (headed by Germany and France) wants the focus to be on regulations and prevention, which means they are less keen on stimulus and bailouts. This is because the latter will involve the tax-payers of countries like Germany rescuing the tax-payers of other EU nations. China, on the other hand, wants an overhaul of the current world order so that they can have more power and say to better reflect their status as America’s creditor. Obviously, the US will not like that because that will mean they have to voluntarily descend for an ascending China.

There are plenty of temptations to take the easy way out. For example, if the Chinese expect the US to inflate away their debts by printing money and thereby, devaluing the US dollar, they will be likely to devalue their RMB in order to continue the process of hollowing out the US economy. The US (and the Europeans), in response, could impose trade barriers on Chinese imports. The Chinese could retaliate by dumping their holdings of US Treasuries. Remember, these are just examples of what may happen and they are by no means predictions. But we trust that you get the idea here.

Therefore, outwardly, the world may be at peace. But inwardly, we believe there will be jostling for power, influence and resources between the major nation blocs. Bigger nations will use smaller nations as pawns, international armed non-state groups will intensify their activities and inter-ethnic conflicts will arise. We have no doubt that there will be plenty of Black Swans appearing in the days to come.