The ability to bail out a chronically and increasingly un-competitive economy that has returned trade deficits for over five decades hinges upon the USDs global monetary hegemony. This today is the USAs most important strategic asset. But this foundational strategic asset is fading fast even though few see it let alone want to accept it.

The volume of trade now settled outside of the institutional and protocol based USD hegemony is growing - most of it via the Chinese alternative trade settlement system for which the US institutions have no access and no data. Once it was just N.Korea, then it included Iran and now Russia and increasingly other nations, quietly trading via the Chinese Yuan.

As the USD gradually loses its global hegemony there approaches the time when the gradual loss accelerates and becomes a rapid decline. Its not now a question of if, but when. Trump can bluster and threaten BRICS nations like Nero but as BRICS rapidly grows in membership and strength and as Chinas importance as a nation all others must trade with or lose advantage is firmly established, the US Emperor and his money printer are found increasingly debased and vulnerable.

Trumps humiliating appeasement of Putins Chinese backed military aggression is just a taste of what is to come as the decline of US resource and monetary hegemony accelerates.