ThePythonicCow
17th January 2026, 05:02
Triffin's Dilemma:
Robert Triffin’s original 1960 argument, set out in his “Gold and the Dollar Crisis” (pdf) (https://ies.princeton.edu/pdf/e132.pdf) paper was that the Bretton Woods system was inherently unstable. The Bretton Woods system established the US Dollar as the World's Reserve Currency after World War II. Triffin observed that a problem arises when a national currency is also used as the world’s main reserve currency, forcing the issuing country to choose between domestic stability and global liquidity. To supply enough currency to the rest of the world, it must run persistent balance-of-payments or current account deficits, which over time can undermine confidence in that currency’s value and financial stability.
The above is well known in economic discussions since as Triffin’s Dilemma.
There is a critical deception in how Triffin’s Dilemma is stated.
The problem is not that the issuing nation must choose between domestic and global objectives. Rather the problem is that the issuing nation lacks sufficient control of the currency.
As accomplished at Bretton Woods, this "global reserve currency" arrangement gave license to banks world wide to lend, borrow, invest, and trade in this "world reserve currency."
Debt-money (e.g. the current US Dollar) is _lent_ into existence. When you borrow money from a U.S. bank, you get Dollars from them, and they get a Debt Contract committing to pay back more US Dollars later.
But since the U.S. Dollar is the _world_'s reserve currency, banks around the world can often lend, borrow, invest, and transact in US Dollars.
I see estimates that two-third's of all the US Dollars in the world were lent (or fraudulently printed) into existence by other nations and institutions, outside the U.S. These dollars are often called "Euro Dollars", where this practice first became common, but that's deceptive. It's more a currency based on Global Debt.
The key insight, that is often missed, and that Triffin's Dilemma Deception obfuscates, is that Bretton Woods left three essential capabilities in the control of the bankers of London, not New York:
Stable value over time for wealth preservation.
Bitcoin, per se, only excels in the "Stable Value" capability. Debt money does not maintain stable value over time, but its debt (bonds, mortgages, gilts, ...) does approximately, with its accumulating interest payments, preserve value, until the debt grows too large to be repaid and defaults. However, until Jerome Powell recently wrested control of the foundation interest rate of U.S. debt contracts (with the change from LIBOR to SOFR) from London (cf Transition from LIBOR (NY Fed)) (https://www.newyorkfed.org/arrc/sofr-transition), U.S. debt structure was critically vulnerable to UK influence.
Borrowing and Lending to fund select projects.
Deep influence into the U.S. Senior Executive Service and over the media and funding (and with Maduro's Venezuelan technology) of elections, and a variety of other influences has provided the globalists ongoing deep influence over the choice of what projects to fund, and much of the ongoing activities of our government, business, military, intelligence, etc.
Buying and Selling ongoing expenses.
The monetary system established in Bretton Woods near the end of World War II enabled the Bankers of the City of London, and their cooperating national, corporate, NGO (non-governmental organization, e.g. United Nations), and covert (e.g. UK MI6, US NSA and CIA, Israeli Mossad, ... intelligence agencies), and criminal (e.g. drug and human trafficking and non-assimilating immigration) to finance activities, world-wide.
The "U.S. Dollar" is not just a United States currency; it's also globalist currency, with headquarters more in London and Brussels than in New York.
But this generation (1930's to now) of the "U.S. Dollar", birthed by FDR in 1931, entered the usual crisis that debt-money systems encounter, after about 80 years, in the panic of 2008. Such systems require the outstanding debt to grow faster than the prosperity of the nations using them. Eventually that debt grows beyond all likely means of repayment. This is a Ponzi scheme, plain and simple.
In the Great Depression of the 1930's in the U.S., banks outside New York City were swept up into, or tossed out from, a national banking system centered in New York City.
We are now in a Great War, deciding whether the headquarters of the next monetary system will be in London or New York. Initially, with BRICS, Bitcoin, the Belt and Road Initiative, China's rise as the next apparent world leader, ... the London Bankers appeared to have the upper hand.
But the New York Bankers saw this coming a long way off, and with their prominent spokesman Donald Trump are gaining the upper hand globally, as they did nationally some 80 or 90 years ago.
Before composing the above, I jotted down a list of various details apparent in current affairs which make more sense to me in light of the above reframing of the confused conflict as yet another global Bankster War, which unfortunately this marginis exiguitas non caperet (i.e. "margin is too narrow to contain", in the words of Pierre de Fermat, c. 1637).
Robert Triffin’s original 1960 argument, set out in his “Gold and the Dollar Crisis” (pdf) (https://ies.princeton.edu/pdf/e132.pdf) paper was that the Bretton Woods system was inherently unstable. The Bretton Woods system established the US Dollar as the World's Reserve Currency after World War II. Triffin observed that a problem arises when a national currency is also used as the world’s main reserve currency, forcing the issuing country to choose between domestic stability and global liquidity. To supply enough currency to the rest of the world, it must run persistent balance-of-payments or current account deficits, which over time can undermine confidence in that currency’s value and financial stability.
The above is well known in economic discussions since as Triffin’s Dilemma.
There is a critical deception in how Triffin’s Dilemma is stated.
The problem is not that the issuing nation must choose between domestic and global objectives. Rather the problem is that the issuing nation lacks sufficient control of the currency.
As accomplished at Bretton Woods, this "global reserve currency" arrangement gave license to banks world wide to lend, borrow, invest, and trade in this "world reserve currency."
Debt-money (e.g. the current US Dollar) is _lent_ into existence. When you borrow money from a U.S. bank, you get Dollars from them, and they get a Debt Contract committing to pay back more US Dollars later.
But since the U.S. Dollar is the _world_'s reserve currency, banks around the world can often lend, borrow, invest, and transact in US Dollars.
I see estimates that two-third's of all the US Dollars in the world were lent (or fraudulently printed) into existence by other nations and institutions, outside the U.S. These dollars are often called "Euro Dollars", where this practice first became common, but that's deceptive. It's more a currency based on Global Debt.
The key insight, that is often missed, and that Triffin's Dilemma Deception obfuscates, is that Bretton Woods left three essential capabilities in the control of the bankers of London, not New York:
Stable value over time for wealth preservation.
Bitcoin, per se, only excels in the "Stable Value" capability. Debt money does not maintain stable value over time, but its debt (bonds, mortgages, gilts, ...) does approximately, with its accumulating interest payments, preserve value, until the debt grows too large to be repaid and defaults. However, until Jerome Powell recently wrested control of the foundation interest rate of U.S. debt contracts (with the change from LIBOR to SOFR) from London (cf Transition from LIBOR (NY Fed)) (https://www.newyorkfed.org/arrc/sofr-transition), U.S. debt structure was critically vulnerable to UK influence.
Borrowing and Lending to fund select projects.
Deep influence into the U.S. Senior Executive Service and over the media and funding (and with Maduro's Venezuelan technology) of elections, and a variety of other influences has provided the globalists ongoing deep influence over the choice of what projects to fund, and much of the ongoing activities of our government, business, military, intelligence, etc.
Buying and Selling ongoing expenses.
The monetary system established in Bretton Woods near the end of World War II enabled the Bankers of the City of London, and their cooperating national, corporate, NGO (non-governmental organization, e.g. United Nations), and covert (e.g. UK MI6, US NSA and CIA, Israeli Mossad, ... intelligence agencies), and criminal (e.g. drug and human trafficking and non-assimilating immigration) to finance activities, world-wide.
The "U.S. Dollar" is not just a United States currency; it's also globalist currency, with headquarters more in London and Brussels than in New York.
But this generation (1930's to now) of the "U.S. Dollar", birthed by FDR in 1931, entered the usual crisis that debt-money systems encounter, after about 80 years, in the panic of 2008. Such systems require the outstanding debt to grow faster than the prosperity of the nations using them. Eventually that debt grows beyond all likely means of repayment. This is a Ponzi scheme, plain and simple.
In the Great Depression of the 1930's in the U.S., banks outside New York City were swept up into, or tossed out from, a national banking system centered in New York City.
We are now in a Great War, deciding whether the headquarters of the next monetary system will be in London or New York. Initially, with BRICS, Bitcoin, the Belt and Road Initiative, China's rise as the next apparent world leader, ... the London Bankers appeared to have the upper hand.
But the New York Bankers saw this coming a long way off, and with their prominent spokesman Donald Trump are gaining the upper hand globally, as they did nationally some 80 or 90 years ago.
Before composing the above, I jotted down a list of various details apparent in current affairs which make more sense to me in light of the above reframing of the confused conflict as yet another global Bankster War, which unfortunately this marginis exiguitas non caperet (i.e. "margin is too narrow to contain", in the words of Pierre de Fermat, c. 1637).