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Winnipeg Free Press
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Here are 007 Canadian ties to James Bond as Quebec auteur Denis Villeneuve takes helm
TORONTO – News that Quebec auteur Denis Villeneuve will direct the next James Bond movie adds yet another Canadian tie to the blockbuster franchise about a British secret service hero. The 'Dune' visionary is set to take over the next iteration of 007 for Amazon MGM Studios with fellow Canadian and partner Tanya Lapointe serving as executive producer. The film franchise sprang from a collection of post-Second World War spy novels by British writer and former naval officer Ian Fleming, who centred his adventures on a suave English operative with an affinity for martinis and a deadly faculty in eliminating threats. But look closely and you'll find several Canadian touches in the books and films. Here's a look at 007 of them. 001 INTREPID Bond is said to be at least partly inspired by Canadian spy and war hero Sir William Stephenson, whose clandestine activities admittedly make it hard to establish definitive ties. But the Winnipeg-born Stephenson, who died in 1989, was a close friend of Fleming's after the two met at a spy school the Canadian founded in Whitby, Ont., called Camp X. Stephenson was code-named Intrepid during his mission days and his accomplishments rivalled that of any big-screen hero: lightweight boxing champion, First World War flying ace, millionaire inventor and entrepreneur, adviser to former U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, confidante to former British prime minister Winston Churchill and chief of an elaborate British spy operation in New York. Fleming has said he drew inspiration from multiple people he met throughout his wartime naval career. But, according to Dwight Hamilton's book, 'Inside Canadian Intelligence,' Fleming described Bond as 'highly romanticized' while 'the real thing, the man who became one of the great agents of the (Second World War), is William Stephenson.' 002 THE FILMS The origins of the franchise can be traced back to Canadian theatre and film producer Harry Saltzman, who co-produced the movies until he sold his share to United Artists in 1975. Saltzman was born in Sherbrooke, Que., in 1915, and entered the film business in the 1940s, according to a New York Times obituary. He co-founded Eon Productions in Britain 1961 with Albert R. (Cubby) Broccoli, with whom he had bought the film rights to Fleming's novels. Lore has it that Saltzman and Broccoli cast Sean Connery as the star of their first film, 1962's 'Dr. No,' without a screen test, citing his 'dark, cruel good looks' as a perfect match for Fleming's description of the hero. Saltzman died in a Paris suburb in 1994 at age 78. 003 THE VILLAIN The first Bond villain to grace the screen was played by Montreal-born Joseph Wiseman, whose turn as the eponymous evil genius in 'Dr. No' helped set the stage for future outlandish malefactors. Wiseman played the even-keeled Chinese-German scientist Julius No as a cool-tempered maniac in a Nehru jacket with shiny black prosthetic hands — his real hands explained away as the 'cost' paid for failed radioactive experiments. Born in 1918, Wiseman made a splash on Broadway in Sidney Kingsley's 1949 play 'Detective Story,' launching a film career marked by offbeat characters, according to a 2009 obituary in the Guardian. His film career included 1951's 'Detective Story' with Kirk Douglas, 1952's 'Viva Zapata!' with Marlon Brando, and the 1974 Canadian film 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,' opposite Richard Dreyfuss. TV roles included Manny Weisbord in the '80s series 'Crime Story.' 004 MONEYPENNY Among the most constant characters to span the films is Miss Moneypenny, a relatively minor one afforded little development until recent films but nevertheless beloved by fans. Canadian actress Lois Maxwell was the first to portray the character of the secretary to the head of the British Secret Service and Bond's boss, M. Maxwell was born Lois Ruth Hooker in Kitchener, Ont., in 1927 and, according to a CBC obituary, left home at age 15 to join the army. She moved to Hollywood at 20, scoring a series of roles including 'That Hagen Girl' with Shirley Temple and Ronald Reagan. But it was the Bond role that made her famous. She appeared in 14 features between 1962 and 1985, including 1964's 'Goldfinger' and 1983's 'Octopussy,' according to IMDB and the James Bond Wiki. Maxwell also starred in the CBC-TV series 'Adventures in Rainbow Country' and in the 1980s, wrote a column in the Toronto Sun under the byline Miss Moneypenny. 005 THE SONG There's some intrigue behind how k.d. lang's song, 'Surrender,' came to close the 1997 film 'Tomorrow Never Dies,' in which Pierce Brosnan stars as the dapper operative. The 'Constant Craving' singer applied her velvety vocals to a well-received anthem co-written by Bond score composer David Arnold with David McAlmont and Don Black. It was initially meant to be the main theme, but was famously passed over for Sheryl Crow's eponymous title song at the last minute. In a look-back for the 25th anniversary of the movie in 2022, lang told Yahoo that the sudden change 'was super disappointing to me because I thought I was doing the opening song.' 006 THE BOOKS Fleming's 1962 novel 'The Spy Who Loved Me' is narrated by a French-Canadian woman named Viv Michel, who recounts her story in a stylistic departure from previous books and was largely panned by critics. Bond doesn't even appear until more than halfway through the story, and Fleming reportedly disavowed it after publication as an experiment that had 'obviously gone very much awry.' When he sold the film rights to Saltzman and Broccoli, they were allowed to use the title but nothing else, according to Eon Productions' Bond website Production on the resulting 1977 film 'The Spy Who Loved Me' — starring Roger Moore as Bond — coincided with Saltzman selling his share of Eon and the film became the first to list Broccoli as sole producer. 007 THE GETAWAY 'The Spy Who Loved Me' features a dramatic ski chase in which Bond is being pursued by KGB agents when he comes upon a cliff face, and leaps off the mountain, escaping near-death with the help of a parachute. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. The sequence was partly shot on Baffin Island, where harsh weather conditions forced the crew to wait 10 days to attempt a jump off Mount Asgard in Auyuittuq National Park, according to When the clouds finally parted, the team had just 15 minutes to capture the stunt. 'We were in this very desolate part of the world, inside the Arctic Circle with an Inuit village about 30 miles away,' said John Glen, second-unit director. 'Each day, we had to travel by helicopter to set up the climbing pylons so the crew could get up there with the cameras. The weather was atrocious.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 27, 2025.
The Print
25-06-2025
- Politics
- The Print
Why 1969 USSR-China conflict has crucial lessons for Iran & Israel
Few underlying questions, though, have been resolved by the ceasefire. Experts who have studied the bomb damage to Iran's key nuclear facilities at Fordow and Isfahan have concluded the strikes left some key infrastructure untouched . Even more important, the country's stockpile of enriched uranium is intact, they claim. The tenuous ceasefire between Iran and Israel—imposed, in part, by a verbal bunker-busting bomb dropped by President Donald Trump—has brought some calm to a region increasingly concerned by the prospect of a protracted, destabilising conflict, and a world terrified by the prospect of more economic dislocation. Far from the ochre-red walls of his home in the Zhongnanhai, the willow-wreathed secret garden where his imperial predecessors had once begun their mornings with cold swallows-nest soup, Mao Zedong knew the hammer of the Soviet Union was rising—threatening to crack his regime open like an egg. Twenty-seven to 34 divisions of Soviet troops had collected along the border with China in the autumn of 1969, comprising some 270,000 to 290,000 men backed by tanks, artillery, helicopters and more. Missiles, armed with 500 kiloton nuclear warheads, lurked near the shores of Lake Baikal. The United States' intelligence community assesses that Iran has not yet made the political decision to build a nuclear bomb—and is at least a year away from having the technology to develop one. But there's no telling if or when Israel might determine that its existential security justifies further attacks. There's no telling, either, if Iran might one day decide it needs nuclear weapons. The incentives for Iran to acquire one are significant. Facing severe international sanctions since 1979, it has been denied technologies to modernise its armed forces or even protect its own airspace. A weapon capable of destroying entire cities is a persuasive argument. In 1965, the USSR and China—one with an arsenal capable of annihilating the world, the other with a crude inventory that might not have survived an enemy first strike—considered remarkably similar issues. Generals on both sides considered the prophecy made by Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamato, as he planned the brilliant attack that almost brought the US Navy to its knees in 1941: 'For the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.' The end of a romance Like Iran and Israel, which once cooperated on a guided missile programme, shared intelligence on adversaries, and established a strong diplomatic relationship, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China entered the post-Second World War era as intimate allies, with large-scale loans for development projects and engineering support. In 1957, Moscow committed to providing China with a prototype atomic weapon, as well as equipment to enrich uranium hexafluoride—the building block of weapons-grade fissile material. This kind of cooperation was not uncommon during the Cold War: As scholar Mustafa Kibaroglu points out, the US trained a cadre of nuclear engineers in Iran, while France and Germany sold Iran uranium enrichment technologies. Visiting Moscow in 1949, Mao called for 'ten thousand years of friendship and teamwork.' Later, in 1950, the two countries signed a treaty of friendship, alliance and mutual assistance. Although the Soviet Union declined to commit aircraft to support the People's Republic's one-million-strong army in North Korea, it proved generous in providing both industrial and military assistance. From 1954, though, the Soviet-Chinese relationship began to experience severe strains. The dispute was, among other things, an argument between Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Mao over the legacy of the tyrant Joseph Stalin. China, however, also saw that a re-industrialising USSR was seeking to repair its relationship with the West. Then, in 1959, the Soviet Union pulled the plug on its nuclear cooperation with China, as it began negotiations on a nuclear-weapons test ban treaty. Moreover, all Soviet personnel were withdrawn from China the next year – a devastating blow to the country's nuclear and military programmes. Also read: Iran is learning the hard way that being a nuclear threshold state isn't safe anymore Toward war Like so many crises, the killing began over nothing, in the middle of nowhere. For over a hundred years, People's Liberation Army troops stationed in Southeast China had looked across the Ussuri River, knowing that the lands of Khabarovsk and Primorsky Krai had once been theirs. The Treaty of Peking, signed in 1860, established the eastern border of China and Imperial Russia along the Ussuri and Amur rivers, as part of a carve-up of lands imposed jointly with the United Kingdom and France. Weakened by war, Qing China had no choice but to accept iniquitous terms. From 1968 to 1969, former Soviet military commander Yuri Babansky later recalled, PLA troops began to intrude into the ice-covered Damansky Island, armed with axes, bats, and sometimes guns. Like on the Line of Actual Control, these skirmishes involved no gunfire. But things escalated rapidly. The first battle deaths came in January 1968, when five PLA soldiers were killed by Soviet troops, in one of the hand-to-hand skirmishes. Then, in December 1968 and February 1969, nine separate clashes broke out, which saw warning gunshots fired for the first time. Early on the morning of 2 March 1969, PLA troops arrived on the island and dug foxholes. Later that day, as a Soviet patrol passed by, some 300 PLA soldiers emerged from their defences and opened fire. Although the PLA was pushed back, even more severe fighting broke out on 15 March. This time, scholar Michael Gerson records, over 2,000 PLA troops were confronted by Soviet forces backed by the brand-new T62 tank, artillery and air power. The Soviet Union's efforts to defuse the crisis were rejected. Premier Alexei Kosygin, Gerson writes, attempted to call Mao on a direct telephone line that had been set up between the former allies. The Chinese operator, however, refused to connect the call, calling Kosygin a 'revisionist element' before hanging up. Also read: Iran's brutal regime is facing a reckoning. Consequences of US attack will go beyond Tehran The nuclear threat From declassified documentation, it's clear the Soviets seriously considered settling the problem through nuclear means. At a meeting at the Beef and Bird Restaurant in Washington, DC, on 18 August 1969, Soviet diplomat Boris Davydov asked his counterpart, William Stearman, 'point blank what the US would do if the Soviet Union attacked and destroyed China's nuclear facilities.' The US, historians William Burr and Jeffrey Richelson have recorded, had made the same proposal to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in 1960—and hoped it might still be on the table. Less than a week earlier, though, the eminent scholar Allen Whiting had met with President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, and made the argument that Soviet-China tensions offered the US an opportunity to split the bloc. Whiting's paper, now declassified, led the United States to reach out to Mao through various channels, seeing if there could be a diplomatic opening. There was, however, no consensus in the US Government at this stage. Former Central Intelligence Agency officer William Hyland, for example, argued in a top-secret paper that a limited China-Soviet war, ending with the destruction of China's nuclear weapons, would be in the best interests of the United States. Finally, the United States chose to remain neutral in the spiralling crisis. The CIA estimated, Gerson writes, that the PLA had fewer than 10 single-stage, liquid-fueled DF-2 medium-range ballistic missiles and a handful of strategic bombers. This force, according to the CIA, could be wiped out in a Soviet first strike. To Soviet strategists, though, there was a more complex threat. Ever since the Korean War, China had learned that its vast geographical mass and gargantuan population constituted a powerful deterrent. Even though Soviet Defence Minister Andrei Grechko argued for multi-megaton assaults on the PLA, his colleagues feared that China would absorb the losses and then attack Blagoveshchensk, Vladivostok, and Khabarovsk, as well as crucial nodes of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. That would bring war inside the Soviet Union itself. For their part, however, China's leaders became increasingly concerned that the Soviet Union was prepared to carry out its threats. Lin Biao, the marshal of the PLA, and Mao, now authorised talks to defuse tensions. The two men, Gerson records, were terrified as Premier Alexei Kosygin's plane arrived in Beijing, fearing it might house special forces or even a nuclear weapon. The lessons of the crisis for the Iran-Israel war are many and profound. For one, China learned that a nation with a fledgling nuclear arsenal could not hope to deter a significant power. The weapons were good for show, but little else. For its part, the Soviet Union feared becoming mired in a war without end. The annihilation of its enemy was inevitable, but would come with costs that just weren't worth paying. For its part, the US would capitalise on the schism between China and the Soviets, with Kissinger making his now-famous secret visit to Beijing in 1971. That would unleash a series of events, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of China as a peer competitor to the US itself. The most important lesson, though, is the simplest one: not all problems can be solved by bombing. In 1969, both China and the USSR learned they were risking catastrophic outcomes for marginal gains. That's a lesson Iran and Israel should be considering with great care. Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal. (Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
Vancouver Sun
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Vancouver Sun
Japan conducts first missile test on its own territory as part of deterrent against Chinese aggression
TOKYO — Japan's military test-fired a missile on Japanese territory for the first time Tuesday, as the country accelerates its military buildup to deter China. The Type 88 surface-to-ship, short-range missile was tested at the Shizunai Anti-Air Firing Range on Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido. The Ground Self-Defense Force's 1st Artillery Brigade used a training missile to target a boat with no crew about 40 kilometers (24 miles) off the island's southern coast. Due to space limitations and safety concerns, Japan conducted past missile tests in the United States, a treaty ally, and Australia, a top Japanese defense partner where vast training grounds are available. Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. A welcome email is on its way. If you don't see it, please check your junk folder. The next issue of Sunrise will soon be in your inbox. Please try again Interested in more newsletters? Browse here. The military said the test was successful. It plans another through Sunday. Dozens of protesters stood outside a neighboring army camp, saying missile tests only escalates tension in Asia and risks for Japan to be involved in possible conflicts. Tuesday's first domestic missile test underscores Japan's push toward a more self-sufficient military and its acquisition of strike-back capabilities as a deterrence to China's increasingly assertive naval activity in regional seas. Japan is also concerned about growing joint military exercises around Japanese coasts between China and Russia. Japan and Russia, a northern neighbor to Hokkaido, have territorial disputes. Japan, under its post-Second World War pacifist constitution, used to limit the use of force for self-defense only, but made a major break from that policy in 2022 when it adopted a five-year security strategy that names China as its biggest strategic challenge and calls for a closer Japan-U.S. alliance. Japan is currently working to deploy long-range cruise missiles, including Tomahawks purchased from the U.S., beginning later this year. Japan is also developing Type 12 surface-to-ship missiles with a range of about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles), 10 times that of a Type 88. The truck-mounted Type 88 guided missile, developed by Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has a range of about 100 kilometers (62 miles). Japan is also preparing to build a missile-firing range on uninhabited Minamitorishima, the country's easternmost island in the western Pacific, an area where two Chinese aircraft carriers were seen operating together for the first time earlier this month. Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here .
Edmonton Journal
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Edmonton Journal
Japan conducts first missile test on its own territory as part of deterrent against Chinese aggression
Article content Japan, under its post-Second World War pacifist constitution, used to limit the use of force for self-defense only, but made a major break from that policy in 2022 when it adopted a five-year security strategy that names China as its biggest strategic challenge and calls for a closer Japan-U.S. alliance. Japan is currently working to deploy long-range cruise missiles, including Tomahawks purchased from the U.S., beginning later this year. Japan is also developing Type 12 surface-to-ship missiles with a range of about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles), 10 times that of a Type 88. The truck-mounted Type 88 guided missile, developed by Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, has a range of about 100 kilometers (62 miles). Japan is also preparing to build a missile-firing range on uninhabited Minamitorishima, the country's easternmost island in the western Pacific, an area where two Chinese aircraft carriers were seen operating together for the first time earlier this month.
New Indian Express
14-06-2025
- Business
- New Indian Express
Looking at the dollar as reserve currency when Trump is floating his "big and beautiful" agenda
These two new books by well-credentialled economists examine the role of the US dollar in international finance. The story has its origins in the July 1944 meeting at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which established the post-Second World War international financial order. The objective was to facilitate free trade based on convertible currencies and stable exchange rates. The troubled pre-war gold standard, where the standard unit of currency was a fixed weight of gold, was not considered feasible. There was insufficient supply of the precious metal to meet expected demands of international trade and investment in the post-war economy. The communist Soviet Union, emerging as a rival to the USA in the global order, also controlled a sizeable proportion of known gold reserves. The debate came down to differences between John Maynard Keynes, representing the UK, and a senior US Treasury department official Harry Dexter White, who allegedly was a Soviet spy. Keynes' bold solution was a world reserve currency (the Bancor) administered by a global central bank. White rejected the proposal: "We have been perfectly adamant on that point. We have taken the position of absolutely no." The meeting took place against the background of a still raging war, the rise of fascism, and the Great Depression. The US had emerged as the pre-eminent economic and military great power as well as the world's richest nation and the biggest creditor. The British and the French, devastated by two world wars, needed American money to rebuild their economies. White's view prevailed. Bretton Woods established a system where the US dollar effectively assumed the role that gold had played previously in the international financial system. Countries pegged their currencies to the dollar which as the principal reserve currency was to have a fixed relationship to gold ($35 an ounce). The Bretton Woods system was ultimately undermined by large US budget deficits to pay for the Vietnam War and President Johnson's Great Society programs, inflation and increased dollar outflows. The dollar's convertibility to gold was removed. There was a shift to predominately market set exchange rates. However, the dollar continued as a major trading and reserve currency. 96 percent of trade in the Americas, 74 percent in the Asia-Pacific region, and 79 percent in the rest of the world is denominated in the currency. Only in Europe where the euro is dominant with 66 percent share is its market share low. About 60 percent of international and foreign currency claims (primarily loans) and liabilities (primarily deposits) are in US dollars. Its share of foreign exchange transactions is around 90 percent. US dollars constitute around 60 percent of global official foreign reserves. These shares are disproportionate to the size of the US economy (around a quarter of global GDP or 15 percent adjusted for purchasing power). King Dollar and Our Dollar, Your Problem, as evidenced by the trite titles (the latter based on Treasury Secretary John Connally's much cited barb), offer conventional histories, rarely deviating much from the accepted narrative. Much of this ground was traversed by Barry Eichengreen in his 2010 book Exorbitant Privilege. Jeffrey Garten's 2021 book Three Days at Camp David- How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy also provides a more nuanced perspective especially on the decoupling from gold. Garten was present during the discussions that led to the suspension and then closure of the gold window. Both books purport to address the question which has been asked intermittently for over half a century: can the dollar survive as the global reserve currency? There are broadly two camps. Those who believe that the announcement of the dollar's death, like Mark Twain's, is greatly exaggerated. Others believe that structural changes in the global economy mean the relegation of the American currency to a lesser, often unspecified, role, perhaps as one of a suite of reserve assets. Both authors reference the standard problems of a reserve currency. The first is the 'policy trilemma' or 'impossible trinity' proposition of economists Robert Mundell and Marcus Fleming. It argues that an economy cannot simultaneously maintain a fixed exchange rate, free capital movement, and an independent monetary policy. The second is the paradox named after economist Robert Triffin. This states that where its money functions as the global reserve currency, a country must run large trade deficits to meet the demand for reserves. Any aspirant to a new global reserve currency status must accept an unacceptable loss of economic control and must run large current account deficits. Blustein and Rogoff do not see these problems posing any immediate risk to dollar dominance. Arguably no other country, such as Japan, Europe or China, which potentially could fill America's role, would want their currency to function as a reserve currency because of the issues mentioned. That is, if they fulfill all the requirements, which they do not in any case. Paul Blustein argues that the dollar's dominance is underpinned by American military power, the US rule of law, and confidence in the dollar as a store of value. The latter is somewhat surprising in that the currency has lost some 99 percent of its purchasing power due to inflation since the early 1970s. King Dollar argues that its long-standing role in trade and capital flows creates a network effect which makes it hard to displace. Rogoff takes a similar position. Our Dollar, Your Problem examines the reasons behind the failure of the Soviet Union (to the surprise of this reader), the Yen, the Euro and Renminbi to reduce the role of the dollar. Rogoff, best known for his controversial This Time It's Different, does express concern that US debt levels, high interest rates, inflation and geopolitical instability could undermine the dollar's position. Unfortunately published before the new US administration took office, both titles look prematurely dated. The world has changed. The Trump administration sees major problems with the dollar's role as a reserve currency. One concern is that it led to overvaluation which has destroyed America's industrial and manufacturing base. A related issue is persistent trade deficits which have driven the US to become the world's largest debtor (foreign liabilities exceed foreign assets by $26 trillion). The arguments, whether correct or not, were raised before in the 1970s and 1980s. A new issue is the President's obsession around US military expenditure which provides allies with security cover. He argues, not without cause, that it has allowed beneficiaries to enjoy free-rider benefits diverting spending to other productive areas without compensating America for its high cost. President Trump and his advisors have plans to tackle the problem. Tariffs are one part of the program. The reason that these target allies is that some hold dollars and, in the poorly founded opinion of the administration, all can be coerced into helping the US implement its agenda. Another involves further weaponising the dollar through sanctions, asset seizures and control of payment systems, a process that has been underway for the last two decades. Both Blustein and Rogoff mention these measures although their impact was better covered in British historian Mark Galeotti's 2022 book The Weaponization of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War. The most far-reaching step (proposed by Stephen Miran, now chair of the US Council of Economic Advisers) would entail user fees for holding US Treasuries (effectively a withholding tax), forcibly exchanging US treasuries for low- or zero- coupon century (100-year) or perpetual bonds (arguably a default) or placing the bonds in escrow (a seizure). Other options include capital controls and denying access to US capital markets. In essence, Trump's "big and beautiful" agenda is for other states to accept tariffs on their exports to the US without retaliation, invest in America by relocating production facilities, purchase US exports and pay tribute to the US (preferably all while prostrating and abasing themselves to access the biggest market in the world!). It is difficult to see how large sovereign countries or groupings like China, Japan, India, Brazil and Europe will find this acceptable. For a start, it would be political suicide domestically. Instead, these actions undermine the dollar's value as well as foreigners' willingness to hold the currency and US assets. The new US administration's cavalier disregard for legal process and the courts are also unlikely to build confidence in the integrity of the US or its financial system. The 'sell America' movement already underway may accelerate quickly as allies shift away from the US, seeing it as an unreliable and rogue actor. Nothing focuses the mind better than the threat of evisceration of your savings and wealth. What King Dollar and Our Dollar, Your Problem skirt is the unsustainable trade and capital imbalances in the global economy that have been building for a long time. These fundamentally underlie the need for a reserve currency. Where India imports more than it exports to China, if denominated in rupees, would leave the Chinese with surplus Indian currency. Alternatively, if denominated in Chinese renminbi, India would have to finance the deficit. This requires unfettered access to investments or funding in the respective currencies. The US tariffs and increased focus on sovereignty and security mean that trade is likely to become more bilaterally balanced. This would reduce surpluses to invest or deficits to finance decreasing the need for a reserve currency. The structure can be extended to encompass trading blocs where imbalances net out between members when aggregated and multi-lateral arrangements such as currency swaps to manage surpluses and shortfalls as needed. High saving rates and mercantilist policies, exporting more than you import and amassing surpluses to finance control of resources and assets, are not sustainable in the long term. As East Asia and the petrostates are discovering, the security of foreign investments is never guaranteed. These states are tentatively moving to increase currently modest domestic consumption, improve low credit availability and expand limited state social infrastructure for education, the aged and healthcare. This would reduce their reliance on trade and exports. Alongside improving domestic capital markets and the range of available investments, this would reduce surpluses requiring investment movement away from free trade and capital flows has implications for prosperity, especially for smaller and emerging nations. But it is difficult to see how this can be avoided. The drift to autarky underway with reductions in trade and saving imbalances may diminish the need for reserve currencies. It implies a world of multiple trading and reserve currencies which has existed at various times in history. King Dollar and Our Dollar, Your Problem are overly US-centric and overoptimistic in their core belief that the dollar's reserve currency status is secure. Given America's economic, political and social problems, this confidence will be tested over the coming years. Satyajit Das is a former banker and author of numerous technical works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011) and A Banquet of Consequence – Reloaded (2021). His latest book is on ecotourism – Wild Quests: Journeys into Ecotourism and the Future for Animals (2024).
