Germany Plans SWIFT Destruction of U.S. Financial System (Source thetrumpet.com) Europe’s declaration of independence from the United States reached the economic realm last week. Last Monday, France and Germany announced that they were working on a new international trading system beyond U.S. control.
“We must increase Europe’s autonomy and sovereignty in trade, economic and financial policies,” said German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. “It will not be easy, but we have already begun to do it.” French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire agreed, saying, “With Germany, we are determined to work on an independent European or Franco-German financing tool which would allow us to avoid being the collateral victims of U.S. extra-territorial sanctions. I want Europe to be a sovereign continent, not a vassal, and that means having totally independent financing instruments that do not today exist.” One of the most concrete of these is a plan to create a European rival to the swiftinternational payment system. “If that does happen, it could possibly lead the way towards Europe redefining itself geopolitically in terms of its military and strategic independence,” wrote Pepe Escobar for the Asia Times.
It may sound like a technical problem, but this is about Europe joining Russia and China to shut the U.S. out of global trade, just as the Trumpet has been warning for years.
When China outlined its plans for a new version of swift, the Trumpet’s Robert Morley called it a possible “turning point for the … United States’ economic dominance.”
swift is a messaging system that allows banks to send transaction details to each other. It is the main form of international communication for banks, transmitting 15 million messages per day. swift is based in Brussels, but it takes orders from the U.S. America uses this power to cut off nations from the global financial system.
Most recently, the U.S. ordered swift to cut off Iran, starting November 4. Without swift, Iranian banks will have no way to communicate with the global banking community. Combine America’s power over swift with the fact that the dollar is the world’s most common reserve currency and the most used currency in world trade, and it means America is an economic superpower. The rest of the world is not happy about this. Europe may want to trade with Iran. But unless it makes some big changes, starting on November 4, it will be very hard for it to do so. China created its China International Payment System (cips) as an alternative to swift in 2015. Early this year Russia tested its own version of swift. Now Europe is working on its own system. This is a huge shift. China’s yuan has a long way to go to challenge the dollar’s supremacy. It is used in only 1.6 percent of international payment transactions. The Russian ruble is even further from being able to challenge the dollar. But the euro has almost caught up already: It is used in 36 percent of international transactions, versus the dollar’s 39.9 percent. The euro’s use as a reserve currency is still a long way behind the dollar. Europe needs to come up with a convincing and permanent solution to the euro crisis to gain the long-term trust of investors. But once that happens, the euro will become a very credible challenger to the dollar.
Prof. Christopher Bovis told Deutsche Welle that Europe’s work on an alternative swift had already begun: “The European Commission has been developing a system, a parallel system to swift, which will allow Iran to interface with European financial systems, European clearing systems, using the nominations supported and created by the European Investment Bank based on the euro.”