As we near the end of what has been a wild summer, the U.S. war with China is heating up as China readies to launch a gold-backed monetary system. 

U.S. War With China
August 19 (King World News) – 
Stephen Leeb:  “These days almost every major news story seems to bear within it more evidence that the world is inevitably moving to a new monetary system centered on gold. The latest example: Friday’s firing/resignation of Steve Bannon.

His departure followed on the heels of his remarkably incautious interview with liberal commentator Robert Kuttner. Part of it was devoted to Bannon’s hard-line view of China. “We’re at economic war with China…we have to be maniacally focused on that…if we continue to lose it…we’re five years away, I think 10 years at most, from hitting an inflection point from which we’ll never be able to recover.”

Whatever you think of Bannon, he’s on the right track about China. But he’s gotten the time frame wrong. It won’t take five years to reach that inflection point. In fact, as I’ve been saying, we’re actually going through such an inflection point – let’s call it an inflection zone – already. And as China’s ascendancy grows, it will, inevitably, lead to a gold-centered reserve system…


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Bannon’s comments about North Korea were also striking. He totally contradicted everything Trump and his military team have been proclaiming, saying it was nonsense to think the U.S. had a military option. He acknowledged that North Korea, and by extension China, have the upper hand because any military action by the U.S. would lead to the deaths of 10 million in Seoul in the first 30 minutes through conventional weapons alone.

Bannon raised the idea of a deal in which China would get North Korea to freeze its nuclear build-up and agree to verifiable inspections in exchange for the U.S. removing all its troops from South Korea. But he called the likelihood of that happening remote, though it wasn’t clear if that was because he thought it was Kim or the U.S. that would reject it.

But as I suggested in last week’s KWN interview, I don’t think such a deal is farfetched. Adam Mount, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, seems to agree. He was recently quoted in The New York Times, referring to U.S. military exercises and arrangements with South Korea, as saying: “There is an opportunity here to put an offer on the table…we absolutely should be considering ways to modify their scope.” In that same article, Robert Carlin, retired CIA, analyst, agreed we should be scaling back our military activities in South Korea as part of a quid pro quo. The point, as the article makes clear, is that there are few alternatives. North Korea will continue to build its nuclear arsenal and will be able to threaten Japan. We’ll face the choice of reining in its nuclear program by exiting the Korea Peninsula or forcing Japan and South Korea ever more into the hands of China. Either way, China wins.

As I also noted in last week’s interview, Japan’s Abe already has made positive gestures to China by indicating a desire to join the Belt and Road initiative. Meanwhile, South Korea has elected as its new president — a dove on both North Korea and China…..more here