DE version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.
Advertisement
Advertisement
⚡ Community Insights
Discussion Sentiment
55% Positive
Analyzed from 6094 words in the discussion.
Trending Topics
#gold#usa#world#trust#more#country#america#countries#power#china
Discussion (137 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
The simplest and easiest geopolitical strategy that is available to any country: switch completely to renewables (solar, maybe wind), EVs, green hydrogen/ammonia and synthetic fuels. Keep out of oil and natural gas. Keep out of dollar system. Any country can be immune to geopolitical drama, dollar shenanigans. Remember China has export restrictions on oil. When things get tough, most of the oil countries (with refining capacity to export) are going to have export restrictions. Thats the only way to deal with the mobs in their own country.
From: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KPq7jyQcemA
Richard Campbell: Politicians aren’t going to do things that aren’t popular, so we have to make these solutions popular for there to be a chance to build political will.
Richard Campbell: Corporations are inherently conservative, and power companies doubly so. Until there is a public groundswell demanding these changes, they won’t act. It’s up to us to make enough noise and show that these are good solutions worth pushing forward.
It's not a total solution, but market forces wise everything says "build solar and batteries with your money". Governments practically don't need to do anything for this to be the default.
China is pursuing the strategy you're describing, but there's a reason they're also building nuclear, they're increasing LNG infrastructure, they haven't phased out coal, and they've built a huge amount of oil storage.
Solar and wind can be part of that strategy but it's not so simple, otherwise people would do it
At this point international trust in the USA is at around the same level as trust in Iran and Russia .
China handily beats the USA in the trust rankings in most of the world.
This can change quickly, as current management is less about comerce and more about "being the new Mao". If Russia can get Ukraine, USA can get Venezuela resources and threat Greenland, why wouldn't I get Taiwan?
I'm betting they'll get elected and then sit on their hands as hard as possible calling it a "return to normalcy", fight their constituency, insist on doing absolutely nothing, and then get kicked right back out 2 years later and whine about people not voting for them.
The change has to be sweeping. The current people in power doing crypto pump and dumps: Internet trolls posting rage-baiting AI slop as official government communications as like the FDA and the CDC, then betting on polymarket about who they're going to bomb, teenaged 4chan trolls ctrl+f'ing for keywords to cancel things like cancer research because it has a "woke word" like "diversity" in published medical literature, these should be structurally impossible from getting near power again. Don't ever forget this happened. There's no undo. Decades down the drain.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/halted-nih-clinic...
And the Wild threats to invade neighboring countries. Someone needs to do to America what America did to Venezuela.
Yet, they get to keep their jobs and it goes completely unpunished. Seriously, felony is not the right term. It's way beyond that.
This isn't just going to go away. You can't just undo what Orange Mussolini is doing, and it'll take far longer than a decade before anything like a trusting relationship can be reestablished.
I do wonder if the sudden noise is due in part due to to Peter Thiel's move to Buenos Aries.
Have the Dem restored "appealing" and leadership?
--
Edit: look, see? About the barbarity of sniping (the counterargument to the at least two hitters at time of edit is not the post from lyu07282). My post is obvious and direct - friend of mine met only days ago a minor intellectual stating that voting the current administration in the usa was "right" given the opponents, and it is one of a long series of encounters. That the acquaintances of the friend were insulted or not in response is irrelevant. That a regime gave power to another out of evident faults is a fact, and if the reaction of some is ventral - "oooh! boo!" - the highway downwards remains paved.
There needs to be some set of adults who take this lawless criminal hijacking of the government seriously for what it is.
This is clear as day, not a matter of politics. It's just clear crime. The material evidence is irrefutable and indefensible and it happens multiple times a day.
What I am curious about is how that global leadership is going to change them, from citizens to government.
European here. I've written about that on Reddit but can't find it because the search there is dogshit so I'll have to write from memory...
We will not trust the US again any time soon, and so is our position regarding the UK. What both of you did, and especially how you got there, is an appalling history, a tale of a completely subverted democracy, and most importantly of a system that never got forced to be updated to centuries of learnings, unlike virtually all developed countries who underwent sometimes multiple wars, revolutions or the occasional peaceful democratisation.
Before we trust you again, you must undergo what we Germans had to post-1945. You have to update your constitutions, yeet out the fossil crap that in no small part led to the situation (FPTP voting, media regulations, in the case of the US making voting either a holiday or move it to Sunday like everyone else), prosecute not just the corrupt politicians but also the oligarchs that backed them, introduce an educational system that is actually worth the name to prevent the youth being corrupted, and demonstrate for many years that you can be trusted again.
Trust is easy to tear apart. All you need is a buffoon shitting in his own diapers [1] or a bus littered with propaganda [2] and a dumbass uneducated populace. But it takes decades and/or immense suffering to (re)build. And for both the US and the UK we gave you not just one chance to show you're better, but multiple. The US first had Bush wo tried to rope us into the Iraq war with his WMD lies, then after Obama came Trump 1, and after Biden came Trump 2, and the final straw regarding the UK and its ever more braindead PM choices was Lettuce Liz [3].
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_Leave_bus
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Truss_lettuce
Literally just yesterday, Germany's public broadcaster released a 26-minute documentary. "The far right's rise: Is Germany at a breaking point?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOk01r2eoc0
The AfD, which became Germany's top-polling political party for the first time last year, is now the clear leader in polls. It may soon win an absolute majority in a German state election.
The far-right is also widely projected to win the 2027 French presidential election:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2027_F...
And Switzerland seriously considered immigration restrictions much harsher than anything contemplated by the US.
It's interesting to see how leftism changes as you cross the Atlantic. In the US it's usually baseless moral self-flagellation; in Europe it's usually baseless moral preening. In neither case do the facts seem to be particularly important.
"we gave you not just one chance to show you're better" is such a fascinating thing for you to say. For years our leaders told you to be less dependent on us. Now you're speaking as though your dependency on us was some kind of favor you were doing for us. It's mind-blowing how out-of-touch you guys can be.
I'm not really sure how you are comparing Trump's US - responsible for pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, tearing up the Iranian nuclear deal and then starting a war to reimpose it that has created a global energy crisis, kidnapping Maduro and threatening to invade Greenland, beginning a global trade war, giving up on climate mitigation, nuclear treaties and AI safety - with the UK over the same period.
Liz Truss is not really Trump's equivalent. She achieved exactly nothing in the UK, let alone the world, in her few weeks in office. It's also worth pointing out she didn't win a general election: she became PM via the Conservative Party's internal selection process.
Something always occurs to me whenever I think about climate change. I think, "What is prosperity?" and the answers are mainly centered on stability and security. Not "stock market" stability, or "national security" but...
Weather stability (floods, droughts, severe storms that lead to crop loss or yield reduction, wildfires, power outages and destruction).
Food and energy security (crop loss or low yields leading to scarcity, food / gas / electric price increases etc)
When I think about my family I think: first priority is to guarantee shelter, food and basic comforts. Everything after that is important of course, but without those three things, it all tastes like ashes. I can't pretend to be happy without stability.
We can pretend that AI and GoogleAds are a great way to measure "prosperity" but in reality, if there's a threat to the basics, we can't pretend to be prosperous. "Value" can be destroyed very quickly when the foundations are gone.
I don't have any more detail than that. I'm a lowly infrastructure engineer. I don't go any deeper than those shower thoughts.
But is Europe looking at the state of the world and pulling it's reserves closer-to?
Also to note, why was the US trusted before? I think it's a heritage from the Marshall plan: The US saved us twice from Germany, therefore we owe them our nations and storing our gold there won't change much. A century later, it does.
I'd rephrase the question as: Would you trust your parents? In childhood years probably, because you owe them your education anyway.
Trust was never absolute. What we trusted was that the US would act rationally to further their interests. The US benefited tremendously from economic development across the world (industrialisation, free trade, rebuilding after the wars, etc). Sometimes the US government miscalculated (like in Iraq), but there was nothing really destructive like what Trump is doing.
Even when we disagreed we could still talk things through and agree on other things. Now, you have Trump insulting allies and praising ennemies every day. Of course there is no trust.
That plan never got implemented.
"On 24 May 1940, Leopold, having assumed command of the Belgian Army, met with his ministers for the final time. The ministers urged the king to leave the country with the government. Prime Minister Hubert Pierlot reminded him that capitulation was a decision for the Belgian government, not for the king, to make. The king indicated that he had decided to remain in Belgium with his troops, whatever the outcome. The ministers took this to mean that he would establish a new government under the direction of Hitler, potentially a treasonous act. Leopold thought that he might be seen as a deserter if he were to leave the country: "He was resolved to remain with his army and amidst his people so as to share their fate."[6] Leopold had long had a difficult and contentious relationship with his ministers, acting independently of government influence whenever possible, and seeking to circumvent and even limit the ministers' powers, while expanding his own."
This isnt the first time European powers repatriated gold from the US. In 1971 France sent their navy to take their gold back because of another conservative US leader who decided to try and leverage our power at the expense of international trust and lost us a portion of said power[1].
I am an American. I preferred when we were stronger because we sweetened the deal enough with everyone else that they let us be world financier/police/anti piracy force/etc.
This fucking machismo theory taking over the older conservatives and the "The Torment Nexus was actually an awesome idea" taking over the tech bros and younger conservatives is fucking destroying us. Both groups seem incapable of believing in a win/win deal. Its also zero sum game to these fuckers and thus our soft power, and eventually our hard power, is being lost.
[1]https://www.helleniscope.com/2025/07/31/august-1971-the-day-...
Iran has exposed many limitations and weaknesses in America's defense capabilities, and it's a fraction of the threat China is.
We have 0 carrier strike groups in the Indo-Pacific right now.
Well. Not sure. Untrustable system, maybe. (The whole chain that brought to this stage is improper - and the damaging factors are still active.)
Yes, China is a likely eventual successor and in some parts is the world has replaced the US in being the influential superpower.
China is currently trying to take control of the whole South China Sea. They’re in a cold war with the Philippines and Vietnam.
Next it will go for Taiwan.
Then either Siberian or Indian territory with the same “these used to be ours” justifications.
At the same time I think will use shadow fleets to take as much fish stocks from around the world as it can.
Not acting yet is not the same as not being expansionist. With all that “we’ll smash your head on the concrete” rhetoric China’s wolf warriors are very clear on where they’re headed.
No, not really. For now we are headed towards a multipolar world rather than a hegemony.
Some people would like to see them put to use in guaranteeing reconstruction and defence for Ukraine.
And miscalculations in game theory happen ("he wouldn't, given...").
And: it is relevant. You gave away the relevancy yourself. It is called game theory. Games have rules. Break rules see what happens. Or instead be prepared.
Seems like someone broke rules but wasn't thinking through consequences or didn't care about them
It is just leverage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTtf5s2HFkA
Canadians, and the rest of the world is finding out that you don't even need a conflict for US to lay claim over your stuff. "We want it", is perfectly legitimate and legal reason for the taking.
The demise of Localbitcoins actual local meetups and trading for cash was the end of a significant way to move money out of regimes that people suspected were going to take it from them.
Localbitcoins facilitated a cash exchange that was extremely useful for people seeking to move money out of repressive regimes and convert it into local currency they could live on.
To your point, that money didn't have to be acquired on Silk Road or something... I used to get paid for work in BTC, and used it to pay rent for a couple years in Argentina by selling it to a dude I'd meet once a month at a Starbucks.
So if the USA declares "ownership be damned", it would be a net win for the USA.
Or in simpler terms: The USA has been giving out IOUs for real goods for decades. It is now tempting to default on those IOUs. The USA did this before. Up until 1971, a dollar certified a claim to gold. Then the USA simply canceled that promise.
The current ramp up to AI dominance might be what holds the USA back from breaking more ties with the world. It is a race that must be won. And investments from abroad help. But when the whole world is operated by US AI factories things might look different. When every task around the world is performed by intelligence generated in the USA, just like every computer is run by US software now - there might be little incentive left to "pay the rent" for the rest of the world that now sits around idle, fiddling their thumbs.
The dangerous situation we are in is that the US is berating and betraying its closest historical allies, eroding its credibility and soft power, and weakening its leverage at a time when threats to the Western order that has existed since the end of WW2 are growing rapidly.
Incidentally, the orange man in charge loves to tout "deals" in which foreign countries agree to invest substantial sums in the US, so any actions that lead foreign countries to believe their investments might be nationalized banana republic-style won't help the administration's efforts to attract investment and onshoring.
Given the last 19 months of tariff chaos while Republicans control all branches of government, I don't see any reason to think they're concerned about that.
Plus the whole "assassinate the Iranian president in the middle of negotiations to start a war across a major global trade-route" thing.
And the US owes trillions.
A more appropriate saying would be cutting off your foot to spite your leg.
Thankfully no one has done that yet.
Also it says about Germany moving gold 10 years ago (2016), but no financial crisis happened back then.
We can't even keep fresh food on our shelves https://trends.google.com/explore?q=moldy%20food&date=all&ge...
I have seen moldy produce all over the GTA here in Canada lately. The homeless situation in Hamilton Ontario is getting out of control.
The province posted a billboard the other day around the corner of my house showing some woman "protecting her community against encampments" (aka homeless people).
There are hoards of homeless people that live in the woods just around the corner of this billboard.
It didn't last 3 days.
Neither did the one they put up after it.
Neither did the non-encampment-scare-mongering-one they put up after it.
The homeless or whoever kept destroying it visually with paint/etc.
It advertises TSN sports now.
And I live in a "nice part of town". East hamilton is another planet. Children stabbing children over bicycles. Children shooting random passerbys. [0] Etc. It's bad.
[0] https://hamiltonpolice.on.ca/news/sarkodie-homicide-suspect-...
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
The second was very clearly a systemic failure out of many factors. Those systemic failures are the point.
Don't forget that Biden and not the orange one blew up the most important gas pipeline of the most important European ally^H vassal.
How can you trust USA after that?
Are we talking physical stuff like Germany deciding third time's a charm and Europe saying "fuck, okay America the gold is already there, do your thing and ship us a few thousand tanks and a few hundred thousand boys from the plains!"
...or are we talking more obscure "fuck, someone did stupid things with excel sheets, we need to make the numbers not say society is over, here everyone...do something with gold!" type situations?
In the former case, this all makes a lot of sense given that the US has both demonstrated a reluctance to assist other countries (sans Israel?) and a lack of capacity to do much if they did care.
I can't help but feel like in a lot of cases you're just going to suddenly crash the gold market and create a bunch of inflation because currency itself is not a "means of production" that you can make things with, it's an old IOU.
Much of the gold was moved out of Europe prior to and during WWI. Partly out of fears of German aggression b ut also because throughout the war, European countries bought massive amounts of materiel from America, which increased the flow of money out of European and into American coffers.
But gold itself is very heavy and thus cumbersome to transport. It doesn't make sense to run transatlantic gold shipments every time a few bars change hands. So central banks tended to keep the gold more or less in one big vault and just sort of move the bricks between one country's pile and another. So there would be, in essence, a large stack of gold in the US Federal Reserve, and that gold belonged to France, or whomever. When the war ended, European countries were devastated and needed goods from somewhere that didn't have depleted industrial capacity and whose farmlands weren't littered with UXO.
This situation more or less cemented America's position as the world's creditor, and so it simply was more convenient to keep a large portion of one's gold reserves in the country with whom you were doing a lot of business. For some countries, repatriating gold is a matter of sovereignty, and e.g. France started repatriating its gold reserves in the 1960s.
Now that Americans have decided they like being a military, economic, and cultural superpower less than they like electing a dementia-ridden child rapist, other countries have correctly realized that America's decline cannot be stopped, only slowed. After all, it's Americans themselves who are the root of the problem, and Trump is but a symptom. This instability is not going to stop when he leaves office. Better get your gold off the sinking ship, but do it slowly so as to not accelerate the sinking before you can get it all out.
Re: the gold situation after WWI, if you're interested I encourage you to read Liaquat Ahamed's excellent Lords of Finance, which won the Pulitzer, IIRC.
The rabbit hole goes quite deep: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_repatriation .
Norway's Oil Fund Proposes Selling Roughly $80B in U.S. Treasurys
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49564189
Dutch central bank moves share of gold from U.S., Canada to London
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49535526
Not saying it's right or sound that he's the elected leader of the country or that our politics is so warped... I mean, I blame it on being on the losing end of the most rigorously fought information war in history.
But I believe you can relax, because this is all nonsense.
FWIW, the American people can't even support a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has been blowing up our soldiers for decades. Hard to imagine they'd show much support for invading an ally.
Sorry, but no.
Even if there are no kinetic attacks towards allies right now, the "crazy old man" is causing real harm. Harm to global stability and the world order, economies, to businesses and individuals, to long term initiatives such as research and healthcare. But most importantly, real harm to the trust between ourselves. Western allies can no longer trust the USA, it is broken, we no longer have the same values.
The first time in 2016 we forgave, everyone makes mistakes and Europe is certainly not free of them. But the American people chose to elect him twice with full knowledge, now everyone suffers.
So the rest of the world forges its own path now. America's military, economic and cultural hegemony will decline. Not tomorrow, maybe not even quickly, but inevitably. Godspeed !
I think it's a tragedy that America elected him twice, and it has already led to chaos among our allies and irreparable harm to the postwar order in which America was the seat of empire after Britain. I think that [the populist brain virus which took hold of America, in 2016 and particularly after covid] was done intentionally by Russia and China who are enemies of America. Is the loss of that order what you are bemoaning?
We are also a country that established itself from European colonies. Every time Argentina or Brazil or Chile or Venezuela or Colombia go through spasms of communist or fascist takeover, Europe takes that as an unsurprising fact, and the bankers keep doing business with them. There is something much more frightening about America reaching some polar political extreme, and it's not simply nuclear weapons (because several very extreme dictatorships have those).
What is scary about it is the same thing that's scary about the AfD in Germany... the idea that we are losing the generational knowledge we built to safeguard some of the world against savagery. In order to believe this, you must also believe that Germany and the US are not already, inherently savage and that some of the order brought by NATO and the postwar order has been a good thing, even up to and including the Cold War.
Then, we can define what is worth saving about America and why it matters.
But the real issue is that he has been elected twice, it is not some one-off freak accident, a lot of americans just care more about transphobia or pizzagate than climate change or geopolitics and thats why its now clear to the rest of the world that we can’t trust the US any more.
When the pigeon shouter threatens to annex Canada/Greenland you can shrug it off, when the leader of the largest economy and military says it, you can’t.
Words matter.
I’m British, We are often regarded as one of the US’s closest allies, I’m fucking furious with Trump and the people who support him, I’ve been boycotting everything US made that I can and I essentially see the current US as a globally destabilising force.
Are there decent Americans appalled by what they’ve become, sure, doesn’t make a difference to the outcome though.
Trump isn’t the main problem, he’s a symptom of the disease that is the main problem, the US elected him twice, that rot goes to the core.
Tell that to Iran. Or Canada. Nobody in Europe is certain that he won’t do anything stupid in Greenland, either. We’re already in a trade war (mostly one-sided but still).
Wow you guys really don't get it, do you? It's not nonsense to us.
Would you keep your food or car in someone else's garage?
We are seeing that foreign countries no longer believe the USA is still a nation of laws.
The US is enabling Russia.
In fact, the USA is supporting Russia. This might not be entirely intentional, and a lot of ways of trying to excuse it, but it’s what the reality on the ground adds up to.
Probably when the Chinese burst the AI bubble the whole fake web economy will come crashing down and close this 30 years of inflated money.
Please explain your logic behind the idea that European countries needed to have adopted the gold standard that the US unilaterally changed the rules on, to be independent from the US.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock