US Billionaires Unite to “Make America Great Again”
Part I of "Make Whose America Great Again?" series
I know there will be many people, honest working people who just want a decent standard of living and an optimistic future, who will feel very upset by the title I have chosen for this piece. I debated whether it was a constructive thing to do, and whether those who consider themselves “true-believers” would simply check out of this dialogue immediately. But I think it is a necessary title and I do believe I will justify its choice to you after you have finished reading this series. I promise my desire is not to black-pill you by the end of this, rather it is my hope that it will empower you.
‘American Exceptionalism’ is I fear a double-edged sword. The United States has no doubt been exceptional throughout its history, but we must acknowledge that it has been both exceptional in its striving for innovation, prosperity, equality and freedom but it has also been exceptional in its waging of wars, and its defense of slavery, genocide and colonialism.
America Exceptionalism, as the world looked upon it, had showed that it was indeed possible to defeat the most powerful empire in the world at the time, the British Empire. And challenge the outlook that imperialism was necessary in order for a nation to become prosperous. American Exceptionalism had especially shone brightly to the rest of the world during the advent of the Centennial Exhibition, organised by Henry C. Carey only 100 years after the American Revolution.
It was at the Centennial Exhibition that ten million people came from 37 participating countries all around the world to look upon the industrial marvels that the United States had achieved in so small a span of time. The United States had become a world leader in education and scientific progress in what seemed an impossibly short period of time.
The purpose of the Centennial Exhibition was to share this knowledge of industry with the world since it was recognised by the United States, under the guidance of Henry C. Carey (Abraham Lincoln’s economic advisor who was responsible for the building of the Transcontinental Rail), that to have access to industry was not only to increase the standard of living of the people but was to free nations from the control of world empires, who operated on weaponised artificial scarcity.
It was also proof that systems of slavery were not, as some argued - lawful, and that such systems could not compete with that of a machine-tool industry. Those who clung to this old system of economy would in turn become impoverished and irrelevant.
With industry, abundance would abound and landlocked nations were not at the mercy of the world’s strongest naval force, the British Empire. The United States would have its engineers travel to Germany, Russia, Japan and China to share this knowledge of industry and the science of economy, otherwise known as the American System at the time. It was recognised that such economic pursuits would be the downfall of systems of empire and it is for that reason, the real reason, why the world was dragged through two world wars.
In fact, even during Henry C. Carey’s time, which overlapped with America’s Civil War, this was understood by many in the world.
Such as with Russia’s Tsar Alexander II who had been approached by both England and France to join them in the defense of the Confederate states. Tsar Alexander II’s response no doubt took them aback. He later reported his reasons in an interview to the American banker Wharton Barker on Aug. 17, 1879 (Published in The Independent March 24, 1904):
“In the Autumn of 1862, the governments of France and Great Britain proposed to Russia, in a formal but not in an official way, the joint recognition by European powers of the independence of the Confederate States of America. My immediate answer was: `I will not cooperate in such action; and I will not acquiesce. On the contrary, I shall accept the recognition of the independence of the Confederate States by France and Great Britain as a casus belli for Russia. And in order that the governments of France and Great Britain may understand that this is no idle threat; I will send a Pacific fleet to San Francisco and an Atlantic fleet to New York.
…All this I did because of love for my own dear Russia, rather than for love of the American Republic. I acted thus because I understood that Russia would have a more serious task to perform if the American Republic, with advanced industrial development were broken up and Great Britain should be left in control of most branches of modern industrial development.” [emphasis added]
In other words, even Tsar Alexander II understood that the American System was indeed the only successful economic opposition to powerful systems of empire that the world had come to know at that level. [France’s economic system known as Colbertism you could say was a precursor.]
Thus, yes, ‘American Exceptionalism’ partakes in a belief. It is a belief in a better future and that there is always a solution to a problem. It is a belief - in the sense that you need to first think something is possible before you can work to bring it about. It is the recognition that the mind is the greatest resource of all, and it is to have faith in our own capabilities for the good.
And it is the belief that the individual is sacred and has real worth. Is this not what every American says they care about the most when they speak of freedom and liberty?
This form of American Exceptionalism did not partake in zero-sum ideology, that many need to be kept down for a few to rise up. It was not a belief in a better future for a few, at the cost of all. And it most certainly would not have gone along with blaming the entire world for a country’s internal problems.
So what happened?
Over the past several decades, especially after the death of JFK, there had been a constant striving by American policy towards deindustrialization.
The American people were not responsible for these decisions, but the majority were guilty of failing to recognise that such policies were in direct opposition to what truly made America Exceptional.
Over the decades poor developing nations were locked into working long-hours for hardly any pay making items that would then be used in the affluent west. Many of these objects were non-essentials - like the notorious Nike shoes made in sweatshops which included the use of child labour.
How curious that at the time when this had made news headlines in the west in the early 1990s, western people were apparently “shocked” that their name-brand products were being made by what could constitute as a form of human slavery.
These shops were located in East Asia, including Korea, Taiwan, India, Pakistan and Indonesia. Nike was caught having sub-contracted factories without reviewing the conditions, based on the lowest bid. In the case of Nike, who was by no means the only one, they began this process in the 1970s but were only discovered by 1991 which broke out as a human rights scandal over the working conditions in Nike’s Indonesian factories.
It was a shocking story to be sure. However, as time went by, western people balked less and less about such things. In today’s world, we are more likely to make a joke of it. However, one thing cannot be denied. At that point, when the truth had been exposed to the world of where such products were coming from and everyone continued buying them, we had all become to one degree or another a silent participant to such a system of cheap, affordable consumerism and towards the idea of cheap labour, from which increasingly became regarded as, whether consciously or unconsciously, a cheap people.
How sad that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 70s, which was so full of beautiful eloquence and power in its stirring words was all too quickly forgotten with the seduction of cheap labor. And how quickly did so many of us come full circle on the question of human slavery.
Cheap consumerism became the drug of the 1980s and on. And it was a hard drug to come off of. However, while this illusion of an upgrade in standard of living was occurring, American industry continued to be torn down. Industrial hubs like Detroit became increasingly ghettoised over the decades.
As this deindustrialization continued, real wealth also began to wither away. Today, many people have no choice but to go for the lowest price, because they now can no longer afford anything higher.
Today we have a country that cannot afford anything more than the cheapest price, and this has spread to the very essentials to life: food, heating, and shelter. Such essentials are becoming harder and harder for a middle-income family to afford, let alone a low-income family.
But this is not the world’s fault, nor is it the fault of China. Americans have become so addicted to a life of cheap consumerism and a brand of ‘American Exceptionalism’ that they now believe it their American right to have all along enjoyed these fruits at the cost of others, and that the world, especially the Asian world, must now pay double or triple fold, for the fact that the United States has disembowelled itself industrially.
I think deep down every American knows that they cannot rest blame on the Asian people whom they used for cheap labor all these years for the reason why they gutted their own industry. I think deep down, most Americans know that the decision for this was made by certain groupings within their own country. But most Americans have given up on the idea of bringing such traitorous groupings to justice, so they rather “chase monsters abroad”, as John Quincy Adams put it. At least then, they don’t have to admit to themselves a much more disturbing truth.
But I am afraid that this form of American Exceptionalism has become a distorted echo of an echo. American Exceptionalism does not manifest itself into being from the chanting of slogans or the constant blaming of others for self-made problems. If Americans truly want to be regarded as Exceptional – they will have to finally clean up this mess for themselves – or fade out with the tides of history as an echo of an echo.
Reality Check: Americans Have Already Been Living Through a Recession for the Past Several Decades
The word recession is defined by Investopedia as “a significant and widespread downturn in economic activity that typically lasts for longer than a few months.”
The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “a period of temporary decline during which trade and industrial activity are reduced, generally identified by a fall in GDP in two successive quarters.”
I hate to break it to you but Americans have been living through a slow downturn in their economy over the past several decades. This is undeniable from the simple fact that the standard of living has significantly gone down. No amount of twilight zone voodoo economics is going to change that fact.
Put bluntly, people can no longer afford what they could afford a generation or two ago, like owning their own house or car (fully paid off). And more and more people are being relegated to the status of a “renter,” the status of owning nothing.
The proportion of the population who make up the middle-class has vastly decreased and the proportion of the population who are now considered low-income have increased. With the upper-income earners also increasing but by a lot less. In other words, middle-income earners are being squeezed out, the greater majority towards the low-income bracket.
The reason why there is still a claimed growth in economic activity and thus the reporting of an overall GDP growth is because the United States moved from an industrial economy to a services economy and a financialized system. In other words, the US economy has largely become that of a casino economy. But as we can clearly see, that is not a measure of real wealth in the country, which is in fact getting poorer and poorer.
Here is the soft underbelly of the US economy that US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has not been honest about when discussing his logic for why the tariff war cannot ultimately harm the US economy. Bessent has repeated ad nauseum his formula that countries with a trade deficit will always come out of a trade war/a tariff war more favourably than countries with a trade surplus. There are many problems with that logic which we will get into in greater detail further in this series, but for now let us just focus on whether the US is truly in a trade deficit.
It is true that the US is in a trade deficit regarding manufactured goods, which is the result of a decades long US policy to deindustrialize.
This began in the 1960s, pretty much after the death of John F. Kennedy, and no it wasn’t the world, or China for that matter that made America do it. It was a decision made from within, just like the decision to let loose Wall Street onto Main Street’s livelihood.
However, the US does in fact have a trade surplus in regards to its services. This makes sense since the US is now a service economy. Otherwise, where would the US be drawing its revenue from - other than its massively growing debt that is…
What many Americans do not understand I suspect when the real GDP is being reported, which was a not too shabby 2.8% growth in 2024, is that that “growth” was made possible by the country going into a 6.4-6.7% GDP deficit.
As we can appreciate with the above graph from the US Treasury Department, almost all of the United States’ so-called GDP growth is in fact coming from deficit spending. In other words, the United States is borrowing money “to keep the party going.”
And oh what a party it’s been, but reality is about to catch up to America’s bubble economy of “living the dream.”
As we can appreciate with the above graph, the US has become increasingly reliant on borrowing money from foreign lenders who by 2023 were owed $8 trillion from the US government. It is about $7 trillion now since there was already a big sell-off that began in 2024 due to decreased confidence in the US economy. This will become extremely important later on when we discuss the real reason why the reciprocal tariffs were paused for 90 days.
The United States is presently reporting the highest “GDP growth” of all the G7 countries, which I hope we can now appreciate is not a very honest reporting of real economic growth. Whereas the BRICS nations are reporting much higher GDP growths. This is to be expected from “developing” nations - it is easier to have a higher GDP growth rate than a “developed” nation since there is more room to grow, more catching up to do.
However, there is something more that is going on here. The GDP growth that the G7 nations have been reporting over the years have not been focusing on the same kind of “growth” that the BRICS nations have been focusing on - where the former has increasingly deindustrialized for the most part, the latter has been industrializing. And as we have come to appreciate with the tariff war, industry is where true wealth lies. And hence said panic from the US government who thought everyone was on board the S.S. Titanic and locked in to their destination point.
The truth is that the United States is a debtor economy. In other words, they are in the business of financialized debt. The deregulation of banks has greatly contributed to the debt crisis the United States now finds itself in. Deregulation of the banks, which would later become known as the Too Big To Fail banks, led to increased risk-taking and contributed to the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s. It also was the reason why the 2008 financial crisis was made possible. More on that in Part II of this series.
And do you want to hear the really crazy part of all of this? Nothing has changed.
And guess what? The interest payments on this monstrous debt are greater than spending on Medicare and even greater than that spent on National Defense!
We can see this casino economy continue today with banks such as Goldman Sachs, UBS, JP Morgan, Bank of America etc. who are presently selling their doomsday prophecies blared non-stop in news headlines and giving investors advice to continue to have low confidence in the US economy, effectively, to bet against the US economy. Don’t get me wrong the situation is very serious but do you know why they are doing it? Because they are going to make a killing in profits off of this.
This is what makes up the majority of the US economy at this point, besides the Magnificent 7[1] and the world’s largest commercial landlord Blackstone who also made a killing during the 2008 housing bubble bust and is the reason why many Americans can’t afford homes right now (more on this in Part II).
The US economy has increasingly found itself made up of piranhas that have no loyalty to the actual state of their country. Wall Street goes to where the money is to be made regardless of what you are betting against, it doesn’t matter what it is, it’s simply a numbers game.
So there goes the money for medical care, there goes the money for education, there goes the money for retirement, for all of your essentials needed to live a decent life since everything is now for sale, didn’t you get the memo? If not, your several decades late.
And somehow Americans have been duped into blaming the world for this terrible mess of a Wall Street casino and slum lord economy that they find themselves in?
And it gets much worse guys. This year, the US government will need to deal with $9.2 trillion of US debt that will mature or need to be refinanced.
In other words, time has run out on kicking that can down the road. The road has ended. It is pay up time, specifically 25.4% of the monstrous US debt has come a knockin’ and again who owns a huge amount of this debt the US government owes? Foreign investors and foreign governments.
Scott Bessent who “broke” the Bank of England and was former hedge fund manager for George Soros (a questionable pick by Trump for US Treasury Secretary if you ask me), has come up with the brilliant plan to pick a fight with the entire world as a means of raising money to pay off this $9.2 trillion of US debt and through these antics be sure to piss off foreign investment when confidence levels around the US dollar were already on the rocks. How do you think this story is going to end?
Before you are tempted to piss in the wind and cry out “We don’t need their money!” let us take a look at how the bond market works, which is fundamental in keeping the US economy afloat so that you can appreciate that America really does need their money or the whole stack of cards comes tumbling down.
These countries listed in the graph above are the largest holders of US debt. However, even more importantly, the top three holders of US Treasury securities are Japan, China and the UK in that order.
What this means is that if Japan, for example, were to sell a bunch of these US treasuries, this would in turn cause an increase in the treasury yield, which is in fact what we saw occur over this past March/April period.
A country, or private investors within a country, can decide to sell off their holding of US treasury bonds for several reasons, one of them being a low-confidence in the US economy’s growth as well as low confidence in the US’ ability to pay back their debt, which would mean a lower return and higher risk of return to the investor.
There are different forms of treasury bonds. There is the 10-year treasury bond that is supposed to guarantee interest plus repayment of the borrowed money in ten years. There is also the Treasury bill, aka T-bills, which are short-term securities with maturities that range from a few days to 52 weeks. There are Treasury notes, aka T-notes, with maturities of two, three, five, seven and ten years. They pay interest every six months and return their face value at maturity. And lastly there are Treasury bonds, aka T-bonds, which are the longest-term government securities issued for 20 to 30 years maturities. They pay interest every six months and return their face value at maturity.
A rising Treasury Yield indicates falling demand for Treasury Bonds which are the bedrock of what prevents the US from defaulting on their massive debt. Investors buy US debt since they have confidence that the US government is good for the money. The belief has been historically so strong in this, that US Treasury Bonds are called a safe-haven for people to keep their money in. Recently, that status has been heavily questioned and many investors no longer consider US treasuries as a safe-haven any longer. The glass walls of the palace are beginning to crack…
Global confidence in the US has been crashing over the past months, it was already not doing too great but it is now really tanking, and during March/April a huge sell-off of treasury bonds and US stocks occurred from largely foreign investors.
The huge sell-off by Japan of treasury bonds, which are more serious to the stability of the system than the fall in US stocks (although this is obviously not good as well) was apparently done by private investors in Japan in response to the tariff war.
We will discuss this further later in this series which will be several instalments since there is a lot to go through, but in a nutshell, Japan was not happy with the US’ decision to tariff aggressively their industry after decades of the country being a solid ally to US interests. The Trump team were gunning for Japan during their “talks” and appeared to be asking Japan to commit harakiri once more, a Plaza Accord 2.0, in order to benefit the US economy.
To the surprise of everyone, Japan finally showed some spine and has refused, at least thus far, to another blood-letting session with the Americans. This did not look good for the claim that countries were scrambling to kiss the ring and strike a deal with the United States. As I am writing this, one month into the “pause,” there has yet to be an announcement on the US signing a deal with any nation, and thus no kissing of the ring appears to be happening...
I would like to quickly add here that Japan is in fact a major contributor to the United States economy in terms of investment, jobs, and training.
It didn’t help that part of the “talks” with Japan was the attempt to strong arm them in buying American GMO rice rather than their own non-GMO rice that they produce…in Japan. As well as the attempt to force them to buy American cars that apparently do not pass their very high safety standard, on top of the fact that Japan makes their own cars.
So the United States seems to have really blown it here. Japan who was a strong economic ally of the US, as well as a strong political and military ally of the United States appears to have had enough.
This is a big boo-boo here. The United States appears to have accomplished what was previously thought an impossible task, they have managed to move Japan and China, who have been historically at odds for centuries, into what is looking like a very close economic partnership, you could say on an existential level.
There has not been a greater error made since the approach to the sanctioning of Russia and the freezing of their assets, which had the effect of Russia and China getting cozy together and are now closer than ever. Vodka shots anyone?
I am sure there is a lesson to be learned here somewhere….But I digress!
The treasury yield is important because it serves as a benchmark for other borrowing rates, such as mortgages.
If the yield goes up, everything goes higher in terms of lending. It also makes it harder for the US government to make good on that $9.2 trillion maturation of debt this year.
This is suspected by many analysts to be the real reason why there was the sudden “pause” on the April 2nd reciprocal tariffs to the world only one week later. The world had responded, and the response was, “We are taking our money off of this sinking ship!” To paraphrase a little.
In other words, the only way the world felt they could protest against the tariff madness was through the bond market which resulted in a rise in the treasury yield. The soft underbelly of the US debt monster. Since a lower treasury yield was absolutely vital in having any hope in paying off the $9,2 trillion this year.
And if the US government can’t make good on this, Day X has effectively come. The day of reckoning. The day the US defaults on their debt and kisses goodbye to it being the center of the universe in economic affairs.
It will be relegated to the status of a beggar on the side of the street at that point since the only thing the US really has going for it at this point is the world’s faith in the US dollar. They have lost supremacy in everything else. Reality might take time to trickle down to the average Joe, but everyone who is paying attention knows the future is in East and West Asia right now, and hence where the money is to be made.
That is why there was the 90-day pause. The US economy could not sustain the economic fallout that was hitting it after just one week of mayhem in the stock and bond markets. They figured it was better to keep the threat paused in mid-air attack, and have each country come to them to make an offer, literally like a scene from The Godfather, which rather embarrassingly does not appear to have any takers so far.
On that note, it has since been made public that part of the conditions of kissing the ring were that nations were to forfeit any trade they had with China. Thus, the United States was asking that countries quite literally deindustrialize their own economies and move their factories to the United States if they wished to avoid predatory tariffs, and in addition to this, forfeit all trade with China. It was effectively a demand for the world, not just Japan, to commit harakiri in service to the American Empire. Who could refuse such a glorious offer?
Oh, I forgot to add that foreign investors also have about $18.5 trillion in US stocks, which is about 20% of the total US equity market.
Where was this money reinvested after the mass exodus? A lot went into buying gold. A significant portion went to the EU market which is preparing to spend a ton on rebuilding a European war machine (more on this in another paper), and a lot also went to…China. The China Interbank Bond Market (CIBM) is the largest domestic bond market in China and the second-largest in the world, trailing only the United States bond market. As of 2022, the CIBM has over US$21.5 trillion in outstanding volume. The total value of Chinese bonds stood at nearly $19 trillion at the end of 2020, representing 15% of the global bond market.
Another interesting thing happened where as US yields were soaring, Chinese yields have been steadily decreasing, showing that confidence in the Chinese economy and its currency the yuan (¥) is growing. I will talk more about this later in the series but I think you get a clear enough picture for now.
I will end this instalment here, but as I have conveyed, this is a big project with many graphs and components to it that I want to discuss with you so please bear with me on the need to divide these into sections. Later in this series I will do a breakdown of Scott Bessent’s speech to the IIF (Institute of International Finance) as well as his plan for the world’s “rebalancing” with of course the United States as its forever S.S. Titanic captain.
Bessent has been very clear that he is working towards a Great Reset of the world balance which he considers off-quilter presently, likely because the world is increasingly looking to Asia for the future. Bessent clearly wants to correct this abomination.
Recall, Scott Bessent is a legend in the Wall Street world, he is quite literally “their man.” And thus we should not be surprised that part of his plan for “rebuilding” America is further privatisation and deregulation. Doctor…I am pretty sure the medicine is killing the patient…
Bessent has made a name for himself working as a hedge fund manager for George Soros and is known as the man who “broke” the Bank of England. So I think it is safe to assume that Bessent knows full well what will be the consequences of these economic policies. And with everything now pointing towards a deeper recession, the billion dollar question is, don’t worry it’s not Bessent’s own money - the billion dollar question is “Did Bessent want a breakdown of the US economy all along?”
It would certainly explain the bizarre decision to continue former US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s horrendous long-term debt plan which increased the US debt by $11.8 trillion in just four years. That is 33% of the total US debt owed by 2024.
2025’s GDP in Q1 is 0.3%, not much of a mighty roar from the King of the Jungle. However, Bessent blames the economic slump as residual from his predecessor and that it will take six months to a year to see the real effects of his leadership as US Treasury Secretary.
But how does Bessent plan on turning the ship away from the iceberg if he has entered in the same coordinates?
It would also explain why the Biden Adminstration’s friend-shoring sounds an awful lot like the Trump Administration’s re-shoring of industries, that is, the mission to get other nations’ industries to relocate to the United States.
Perhaps it has been the same agenda all along. For all of these decades. A different captain but the same ship headed for the same destination. However, on the bright side, not everyone is on board, and there is still time to jump ship.
Part II is now available here.
Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.
Also make sure to watch our RTF and CP films and documentaries here.
Footnote:
[1] Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Meta Platforms (META), Microsoft (MSFT), NVIDIA (NVDA), Tesla (TSLA)
Part 3 is now published, apologies for the delay. The title is "The Difference Between William McKinley’s American System School of Protective Tariffs and Today" and you can read it here: https://cynthiachung.substack.com/p/the-difference-between-william-mckinleys
Thank you for this great report especially about bessant . Waiting for the next report ❤️