People obsessed with China clobbering the US with dedollarization can't tell the difference between a gold-shill like Peter Schiff, an unprincipled propagandist like Pepe Escobar, and a banker with predictive power, like Michael Every. Of those three, only Michael Every correctly pointed out that China will lose the most in global decoupling of supply chains. Pepe Escobar predicted China would take all the upstream suppliers with it. Wrong. Peter Schiff predicted financial collapse. Also wrong.
When I posted https://aaronlee.substack.com/p/inflation-pain-tolerance I pointed out that China was now falling behind the US in a way that seemed to be accelerating. I didn't make that up. I just listened to Michael Every and some other interesting thinkers and compared that with exchange rates and my own data studies.
I selected Every, because I recognized in his arguments aspects of my own belief systems; just like the goldbug would go with Schiff and the anti-American would go with Escobar. But gold does not outperform all other assets, so the goldbug thesis lacks predictive power. Escobar avoids predictions so he lacks the traits of organized thought. Even his hunches have been wrong and he has to constantly revise his model to correlate with reality.
When two or more belief systems compete, the better one will win. There may or may not be synthesis. Goldbugs accept their thesis as 'good enough' even if the entire second half of the 20th century proves that a non-gold monetary system allowed for faster asset creation. Gold measures all assets in terms of gold. Gold must be worth more when assets are created in their worldview. This has failed throughout history, but they don't care. And if the global 'South' and China are coming to get revenge on the global 'North' in Pepe Escobar's world, he can't seem to stick to a thesis very long, before real life contradicts him. A good belief system doesn't need to be right every time, but it needs to beat no belief system and chance.
Kant would say a belief system requires judgment (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals), but is not judgment itself. Judgment itself comes from trained intuition. I would add that trained intuition must connect to other judgments we have trained in order to be holistic. And we want holistic thinking, in order to apply the strengths of our specialties to new situations that don't immediately seem soluble with our existing skillset.
When we have 'containerized' thinking that is disconnected to the rest of our thought process, we have a competing model. When we have competing models, their methods are mutually exclusive, or non-compatible. They may synthesize, but they will not result in a functional belief system that yields useful results, the way they might in their various containers. Even if there are advantages to flawed synthesis, one cannot avail one's self to predictive power, because deduction requires maximal analytic capability, and bifurcated consciousness cannot provide that.
China slid 4% against Russia today. https://aaronlee.substack.com/p/the-russian-financial-superpower https://aaronlee.substack.com/p/ruble-vs-yuan-part-2