The U.S. Empire Is COLLAPSING — China, Iran & BRICS Are Changing the World | Silk and Steel

**Rasheed** (0:00)
Oh, Carl is in the building, everybody. Carl is in the building. I'm gonna bring him up on the screen.
Carl has just joined the stream. Told you guys Carl would be here. You just went out.

**Carl Zha** (0:10)
I just came back from a walk. I was distracted by pot stickers that was selling. I'm in Shanghai, by the way.
So I just went out for a walk, and it was good smelling pot stickers off the roast. So I got distracted, and I lost track of time. I was eating, and then I realized I had that point, and so I rushed back. Yeah, so I'm here.

**Rasheed** (0:33)
So Carl, I wanna get your opinion on this. You know, Jerusalem, when all else fails, they take you to war. Have something that said that the United States has borrowed from, in less than one and a half month, a billion dollars, also injected another $5.2 billion into the United States. The other hand tells us, the economy ever, and that America is in the greatest economic shape ever. How is that possible?

**Carl Zha** (0:57)
I mean, nobody, by now, everybody should have learned, nobody should trust Trump, because Trump is only looking at the inflated stock market figures, you know, like that's all he cares about, because he's playing a market manipulation game by, you know, he's tweeting out information one day and have his son Byron making a killing on the stock market bet. That's all he cares about. But the real economy is not connected to the stock market at this point. US has a giant AI bubble that will pop sooner or later. But if you take away all the AI investment into the US economy, US growth is zero and maybe even negative. So, yeah, the United States has been running on borrow money for a long time. Now, this works as long as US can continue to print money. And the rest of the world takes US dollar as a reserve currency. Now, that's also changing because people are wising up to the fact that they're subsidizing US wars. And this is why China has reduced its holding of US. Treasury by more than half. At the peak, China bought 1.4 trillion dollars of US debt. And now, today, it holds around $630 billion worth. And that number continued to go down year after year because China just holds their Treasury to maturity, but they're not buying new ones.
And eventually, the US will have no option but to continue to print money, which will lead to devaluation of the currency. Now, Scott Besson, Trump's right-hand man, is trying to manipulate the currency right now.
One way they do it is wage war all over the world. So it makes it appear the United States' stock market is the only safe place for you to park the money. And this has also led to the strengthening of US dollar in the recent month, because a lot of other countries, especially countries in East Asia, that depending on oil imports from the Persian Gulf, their currency has been devalued in like crazy right now. This goes both for countries like Philippines, Indonesia, India, but also countries like Japan and South Korea, because all these countries depend their energy from Persian Gulf.
And because the oil is priced the US dollars, all their currencies are devaluating against the US dollars. China is the only exception in East Asia. Chinese currency is actually strengthening against the US dollar because China actually produced things, unlike United States, US produced debts. They're not, everything is financialized nowadays. So this is, this shell game can only continue for so long. I mean, they might be able to do it for another year, two, three years, but in the long term, this is not sustainable. You know, we all know the amount of US debt is like, what, 37 trillion and counting right now. And every year, US government had to spend more just to serve the interest payment.
Yeah, it goes up quick. And every day, US government had to spend even more to just serve the interest payment. They can do that again by continue to print money, devaluate the currency, but that will mean, you know, the life will continue to deteriorate for the rest of the Americans. Well, that has already been happening for a while. You know, we saw price increases in United States. One thing amazed me now that I'm in China is how cheap everything is, because everything is manufactured here. So everything is affordable. You know, but if you go to... I recently, so I broke my wrist a couple of days ago, a bicycle riding on a slippery road. So I experienced the Chinese Medicare system firsthand.