Since the arrival of the Chinese AI tool DeepSeek in January, this month has seen a flurry of conferences on artificial intelligence (AI). At the AI Action Summit in Paris on February 11, 2025, attended by global leaders like EU President Ursula van Leyden, French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Modi, US Vice President JD Vance made four major US policy points on AI. First, the Trump Administration “will ensure that American AI technology continues to be the gold standard worldwide, and we are the partner of choice for other foreign countries and certainly businesses as they expand their own use of AI.” Second, “we believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off.” Namely, the US wants more AI deregulation. Third, we feel very strongly that AI must remain free from ideological bias, and that American AI will not be co-opted into a tool for authoritarian censorship.” Fourth, the Trump administration will maintain a pro worker growth path for AI.” Trump2.0 does not fear job losses as AI is seen as a tool for job creation. The current daily tornado of Executive Orders and speeches by key American officials on global issues suggest that despite the sound and the fury, the key signal of Trump 2.0 is to transactionally create fortress America, defended by tariff and migration walls, aiming to achieve the gold standards in energy, AI/technology, military power and the dollar. Tariffs on Canada and Mexico, claims on Greenland, and ending the war in Ukraine only prove Henry Kissinger’s dictum, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” No country has experienced such a bitter lesson than Ukraine, having lost an unverifiable number of war casualties, huge war debts to NATO countries, with threatened US aid cut-off, unless it cedes rare mineral rights to America. What is happening to the gold standard, since the price of gold has hit just under US$3,000 per ounce in New York, performing better than S&P 500 or the NASDAQ stock indices? Veteran gold analyst Alasdair Macleod has argued that recent events in the New York and London gold markets show that the gold price uptick is less about the speculation on gold as a hedge against systemic risks, but more an issue of the devaluation of the dollar standard against gold. Indeed, the dollar has strengthened against the other reserve currencies as inflation has remained stubbornly higher than the Fed anticipated, so US interest rates are higher than Euro, Japan or Chinese interest rates. Indeed, central banks like China, Russia and smaller countries are beginning to buy gold in serious quantities, worried about possible US sanctions on their financial systems for geopolitical reasons. What the gold standard for money shows is that any benchmark is not absolute and is relative to something else. Thus, the US is benchmarking herself against China in different metrics, such as finance, technology, military power, […]
4星期前
更多Gold
