Authored by Pepe Escobar, Op-Ed via RT.com,
In his seminal 'Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization,' Bryan Ward-Perkins writes, "Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue forever... They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.”
Back in September, we noted that the US was set to send 20 new nuclear bombs to Germany each of which has four times the destructive power of the explosive dropped on Hiroshima.
“[These] new attack options against Russia” constitute “a conscious provocation of [Germany’s] Russian neighbors,” one member of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats warned. Sergei Lavrov’s de facto number-two, Maria Zakharova said the move represented an “infringement of Articles 1 and 2 of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”
Following China's Central Economic Work Conference which concluded on Monday, and which mapped out China's economic priorities for next year, global markets soared on speculation that China will, once again, unleash some form of stimulus, which in turn sent commodities surging over the past three days even though ironically any incremental injections, monetary or fiscal, will simply force domestic producers - already on the brink of bankruptcy - to produce more, export even more, and accelerate the global deflationary tide which earlier today forced the US to fire the first trade war salvo
Ever since 2010 we have explained that one of the biggest risks facing the world is China's gargantuan mountain of debt, seen in its consolidated state in the following McKinsey chart...
... a mountain which has doubled from its 2007 levels of 158% of GDP and which as of Q4 2015 is well over 300%, as China races to catch up with world-record holder Japan and its 400%+ total debt/GDP.
In late October, we noted that for the second time this year, Russia overtook Saudi Arabia as the biggest exporter of crude to China.