Yesterday Today Tomorrow

Announcer: Yesterday, connecting past. Today, with an outer view. Tomorrow, to understand future. Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is the program that covers the current contemporary social issues in the light of our history, to understand our yesterday, to live fully today and tomorrow. Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow with Inseong Kim.

Inseong J Kim: Hello, this is Inseong Kim from Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. This program is after 250 years of our independence. I want to talk about continuation Part 1, which I recorded last month. This is Part 2 about independence and what it truly means, tied into the monetary system.

Our title is "No Country Will Surrender Its Currency." Independence connections to globalism or surrendering to the Yuan system—Chinese money—all of these tie directly into challenging our freedom and being independent. We're going to go over more in-depth how this monetary system affected our country and where we are at today.

No one needs to surrender its currency when the petrodollar was utilized all over the world. That's the difference between using the dollar system over a new system that can come either through globalism or through the Chinese system. That's the biggest difference connected to our independence. When you surrender your currency, you are losing your freedom. That's the end of the story.

America has solved every monetary crisis of the modern era in single meetings three times. Each time, the world said it was impossible. Each time, the world was wrong. History shows America has done this before, and America will do it again as history supports it because we have a belief system that believes in freedom and independence.

That's what we wanted to promote all over the world: to equip them, protect them, and provide for them to be independent so they have their own sovereignty, their own currency, and their own constitutions. They set the interest rate and manage their own money. That is freedom. The dollar did not really intervene in each country's currency.

Look at all of the world. Who helped those countries, including China? America did. America's petrodollar actually brought prosperity for all of the world up to this point, and we're at a very critical point. Every 40 or 50 years or so, the world monetary system reaches a breaking point. The existing architecture no longer reflects the underlying reality of power, production, and genuine human need.

The pressure builds until it cannot be contained. Then, not through gradual evolution, international consensus, or a global currency that no nation would ever accept, the world changes. Through one meeting in one room over a matter of days, the world changed. It has happened three times in the modern era.

America convened and decided each one. Each time, the crisis looked unsolvable from the outside. Each time, a small group of clear-thinking people walked into a room and solved it. Each time, the world followed. The system that we had was respect for each country. That was key. That's why South Korea was able to thrive economically.

If the dollar controlled their economy, then they couldn't. A lot of other South Asian countries were allowed to grow through the use of the dollar monetary system. We're at the fourth breaking point right now, connected to the iron war. People have to understand this situation that we're in. It is very surprising how our views are all diverse about this iron war, but I don't think a lot of people understand what is really going on.

The pattern is worth understanding precisely because understanding it is the most honest basis for confidence that America will navigate this one too. Why is a global currency not the answer? It never was, and if it ever happened, it will not last long. Throughout history, whoever attempted the globalism idea and tried to dominate the world, they failed. History proves that.

Before tracing the three meetings, it is worth stating plainly what the answer was not and will not be. The answer was not and is not a global currency. It was not the answer for 1944 when Keynes proposed the Bancor, which was a global currency. It's not new that we're hearing about a global digital currency. It was not a new concept.

It happened already in 1944 when they introduced Bancor and were overruled. It is not the answer today. Answering why clarifies everything that follows. No country will surrender its currency: not America, not China, not Germany, not India, not Brazil. This is not stubbornness or nationalism. It is an understanding of monetary policy.

The ability to set the interest rate, expand and contract the money supply, and devalue or strengthen relative to trading partners is one of the most powerful tools a government has over its own economy. Surrendering means surrendering the ability to respond to unemployment, inflation, recession, and financial crisis on your own terms.

Manipulation of underlying currency means entering into complex issues as it is to deeper complex problems that have not been foreseen. We had a virtue of, "Okay China, you be the manufacturer. We're the white-collar workers." We diversified the whole world as a corporation and we expected it to work like one corporation.

But we have to understand we don't have one corporation. We can't even have one corporation in America. What if we think your state does one thing, the other state does different things, and then we just make it one whole corporation? That doesn't even happen in one country, so how about the world? It's not working because we designated the whole manufacturing system to China.

The whole world is suffering. A lot of the young generation don't have jobs, not just in America but all over the world. This system of centralizing is not working. Whoever has a dream of utopia, we have to re-examine it. It can happen in the movies but not in reality. The Eurozone is the world's most advanced experiment in shared currency, and its experiment is educational.

When Greece faced a financial crisis, it could not devalue its way to competitiveness as Britain did outside the Euro. When Southern Europe needed monetary stimulus, it had to negotiate in Frankfurt rather than decide in Athens, Madrid, or Rome. The benefits of shared currency are real; the costs of surrendered monetary sovereignty are equally real, and they fall unevenly.

That is the fact. Even though Europe tried it, the economic system is so complex when you combine all of those. It gets really complicated. Even a single country's economy is complex enough; combining different countries' monetary systems and managing it is going to be very complicated. As far as AI hype goes, I don't know, a lot of people say AI is so smart.

I don't think we're there yet. It might get there someday, but it will be a broken system. Even though World War I and World War II were attempts for globalism, they failed. All the AI systems that we're building will fail. It will not be a perfect system. It might work locally where they can try it and control it, but eventually, it will fall apart.

Even the Bible proves that in Revelation; it falls apart. That's the truth that we are in. Rather than living in fear, at the end of the day, the system that we have in human nature doesn't change. Human nature's love of freedom and being independent does not change. Scale the Eurozone's tension to a global currency now, including China, the United States, India, Brazil, and a hundred other nations with fundamentally different economic structures and interests.

The governance problem becomes insoluble. Whose central bank sets the global interest rate? Who decides when to expand the money supply and when to contract it? Who absorbs adjustment costs when the single global rate is wrong for half of the world? It creates problem and tension again. It's not a solution.

A global currency is not the answer because it cannot be the answer. The question is not how to replace the national currencies with a one-world currency. The question is what arrangement among sovereign currencies best serves the world's genuine need for a stable, trusted, accessible means of exchange and reserve. History proved the world has prospered from the petrodollar since World War II.

Whether the mainstream media or social media disproves it or not, we're gobbling up the wrong history. It's incredible to watch people believing lies and not seeing clearly, admiring a different system over our system. The reason our system failed is because we surrendered our manufacturers to China. That's the biggest failure we had. That's why we look like we're failing.

But at the end of the day, we are waking up and we are going to come back to where we were. Three meetings changed the world, each answering that question differently for their moment. None of them required any nation to surrender its currency, and none of them produced a global currency. Each of them produced an arrangement that the world accepted imperfectly, with cost, because it addressed a genuine need.

The question has never been how to replace national currency; it has always been what arrangement among the sovereign currencies best serves the world's genuine need. That is the difference: dominant versus serve. That is a different approach to how things are approached globally from the U.S. versus the CCP system.

Since the CCP is controlling all their economies and it's not freely going in and out, there's no freedom. In the beginning of my program, I shared that the monetary system is tied to our freedom and independence. That's something we cannot neglect and oversight. Being educated about this monetary system that we're in and understanding current events—freedom has a cost.

A lot of people shed blood to protect our freedom, and I think our time is here to respond to protect our own freedom. A lot of people on podcasts say we don't have freedom in America. I don't know. We might not have a perfect system, but when you get up in the morning, you will realize what kind of freedom we have versus everything being controlled in the dark.

Three meetings changed the world. I'm going to go over them in more detail, but rather than just briefly understanding each event, I would like our audience to really comprehend what that means. The history of modern monetary arrangement is, at its core, the history of three rooms. What happened in each room, who was there, who decided, how long it took, and what surprised the world is worth understanding.

The pattern, understood clearly, is the evidence for hope. I am suggesting that instead of sharing all the hopeless messages that AI is going to take over all the jobs, our government has information that so many jobs need to be filled. We have to re-examine that AI hype. Also, we're promoting a generation of children not to be motivated to work or to thrive, robbing them of that motivation.

That is another thing connected to this monetary system that we have to understand why it's happening. Meeting one: there are three meetings I want to introduce, and the fourth one is the one that we need to prevent this system we're facing. Meeting one was in 1944 at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. It lasted 22 days, July 1 to July 22, 1944.

There were 730 delegates from 44 nations. The principal architects were Harry Dexter White of the U.S. Treasury and John Maynard Keynes of the British Treasury. The real decisions were made by White representing America, backed by the full weight of the American gold reserve: approximately 20,000 tons and 70% of the world's monetary gold.

The dollar was fixed to the gold at $35 per ounce, and all other currencies were pegged to the dollar. The IMF and World Bank were created. The international clearing union that Keynes proposed with a neutral Bancor reserve currency was rejected. White's dollar-centric plan prevailed because America held the gold and White controlled the commission agenda.

Bretton Woods lasted 27 years, long enough for Europe and Japan to rebuild and long enough for global trade to reach the scale its architecture could no longer support. By the late 1960s, the American deficit had accumulated dollar liabilities to foreign governments that far exceeded U.S. gold holdings.

Someday I'm going to have another program about connections to the decisions we made with the Chinese economy, along with these decisions that gradually tilted in favor of China. Even draining all the money from the U.S. in the Vietnam War was part of the plan, dragging it out for a long time. As I shared, the white race in 1945 was 90% and it went down to 50-something percent today.

A part of that was a lot of people who fought for World War I and World War II were of the white race. Targeting critical race theory and all of that to white males in America is something we have to re-examine on Father's Day. I'm not trying to promote racism, but at the same time, we have to have a critical mind of what that means to us in America.

The economist Robert Triffin had predicted this in 1960, testifying to the Congress that the system contained a structural flaw that would eventually force a crisis. He was precise and correct. The crisis arrived in 1971. Meeting two was in 1971 at Camp David, Maryland, at the President's retreat. It was three days: August 13 to 15, 1971.

However we listen to the media and all the YouTubers presenting history, we always have to come down to thinking as a citizen in America and how it affects my family and this nation. President Richard Nixon was in the room with approximately 15 senior advisors, including Treasury Secretary John Connally, Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns, Paul Volcker, and George Shultz.

No foreign governments were consulted or informed in advance. What happened was the American gold reserve had fallen from 20,000 tons to approximately 8,000 tons. Dollar liabilities to foreign central banks had reached $80 billion against gold holdings worth only $10 billion at the official price. France had to send a warship to New York to retrieve its gold.

A full-scale run was beginning and Nixon and his team spent three days designing a reverse. On Sunday evening, August 15, Nixon announced the Nixon Shock. That's the brief history. I'm going to continue our program finishing to understand what is happening with the monetary system and wars, where we are at today, and our freedom and independence. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next week.

Announcer: You've been listening to Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow with Inseong Kim. You can also find more from Inseong Kim at inseongkim.org. That's I-N-S-E-O-N-G-K-I-M.org. Thank you for listening to the show.