The trade war isn't just about tariffs anymore. It's about control of global trade, and it's exposing China's second fatal mistake, one that could cost them global power for the next one hundred years.
Now.
They already blew it once in eighteen seventy three when the world shifted monetary systems and China chose wrong, losing its leadership on the global stage. Now, while headlines scream about tariffs and trade deals, behind the scenes, a new monetary revolution is underway.
I'm Mark Moss.
I've spent two decades tracking money markets and the geopolitical shifts that shape empires. My video from four years ago called out China's big mistake, and now it's time for an update. So in this video, I'm going to show you what China missed, what the US just did, and why the shift will redefine global power for the next century. Because this isn't just a trade war, it's a monetary war, and Trump's trade offensive is the spark that's magnifying the consequences. Now,
almost no one is connecting these dots. But once you see it, you can't unsee it.
So let's go.
All right, So we're getting right into this, and we're talking about on the surface, it seems like a trade war.
Now.
A couple days ago, at the time of this recording, we had what Trump was calling Liberation Day, which is we're going to stop letting the world take advantage of the United States. We're going to put retaliatory or even tariffs on each other to even out the playing field. And there was a big announcement. Trump had this big board showing all the different tariff rates against each of these individual countries. Now, since that time, the world has
gone into a tailspin. We've seen the S and P five hundred start to crater down, as you can see this gap in the market right here showing the big big step down. The Nasdaq doing the same thing with these big gaps as it's dropping down. And so the world is sort of in a panic. But I think they're watching sort of the wrong thing.
Now.
People say that Trump is playing forty chess, So it's not just the Tterarff's just forty chess.
Well, I won't lay out the entire playbook, although I'm working on that.
If you want to video on that, let me know.
But let's talk about a big piece of this now since then, there's already been.
A lot of movement. So a lot of people say, it's the art of the deal.
So he throws out this as an anchor, and then he negotiates back.
So fifty percent tariffs on you, Okay, we'll take ten or whatever.
So we use these as negotiating tactics, and it seems to be working. As a matter of fact, at the time of this recording, a lot of the world is already coming around and wanted to strike deals. We've seen India announce that they're gonna even the playing field, Argentina, Vietnam, lots of countries at the time it's recording. As of today, as of this morning, even the EU says that they will probably cave.
Which seems like the EU is gonna hold out. So all of these countries are coming around.
As a matter of fact, Trump said that over fifty nations have agreed to come in and work this out, but China seems to be wanted to fight back.
As a matter of.
Fact, China announced retaliatory tariffs against the United States and they will probably be the last one to come to the table. Why is that, Well, we're gonna break that down. We have to understand this is not just a trade war. This is not just about goods or prices or jobs. This is about monetary policy. And this is where the two big dogs want to battle this out, the monetary policy. Okay, So, if you watch my videos for a long time, I used to do this where let's go back in time.
Let's go back in history and see what the historical precedent is for what we're witnessing right now. So let's go jump back about one hundred and fifty years. By the way, if you've been watching my videos long enough to remember this, drop me in the comments. Let me know how long you've been watching and supporting this channel. Okay,
let's go back to China's first fatal mistake. Now we're going back to about eighteen seventy three, and this is when the whole world monetary system shifted as well.
You see, at the.
Time, the world had what was known as a bi metallities. We had gold and we had silver, Okay, And what happened is the world started changing, the world order started changing, and the entire world, or most of the developed world, that is, the United States and countries in Europe, decided that they were going to go to a gold standard. The problem is for countries like China is they had a bunch of silver and they didn't want to go onto a gold standard because they had silver, so they
were going to stay on a silver standard. And so we can see some of the headlines from this era say like how the silver standard wrecked China's economy. So by deciding to stay in the old monetary order when the new monetary order was shifted, it wrecked their economy. And it didn't just wreck their economy, as a matter of fact, we can see that it did a lot more than that. So here we have the year eighteen seventy three marked a turning point in monetary history, and
that is when the world shifted. So the German Empire went from silver to a gold mark. In September, the Parish Mint limited silver coinage into the double gold silver standard, so they went to gold. Earlier that year, the US Congress legislative phasing out of the temporary paper currency and
replaced it with gold dollar. United Kingdom already on the gold by the end of the eight eighteen seventies, silver which until eighteen seventy three, that's the turning point, had been on an equal footing with gold became a secondary currency medal used by mostly periphery countries. So leading countries made the move. If you wanted to be a third rate country, perifery nation, you stayed with that.
The montary impact was stark.
Between eighteen seventy three and the end of the decade, silver depreciated by some twenty percent, and so as China decided not to go to gold and decided to hang onto silver, it continued to lose its purchasing power. Now it lost twenty percent, ended up losing thirty percent. So the nation China saw their national.
Purchasing power dropped by thirty percent.
It's a massive, a massive drop in standard of living. We can see by nineteen thirty three. In November of that year, the Chinese government threw in the towel. They nationalized what silver was left, and they put the country on a paper currency standard and said, so they decided finally to capitulate. Finally, okay, we lost the world went to gold.
We didn't.
We stayed and said, okay, we lost thirty percent of our personal power. Okay, let's throw on the towel and we'll eventually capitulate. And we'll move over after they lost thirty percent. But it wasn't just thirty percent they lost.
They lost their.
Position as one of the global dominant world leaders. They became a prefer nation, as it said. Now, that was their first fatal mistake. Now they've spent the last one hundred years were longer, trying to catch up, trying to fix or right the wrongs of that past. So for the last one hundred years they've been trying to get back to the gold standard. They've been trying to get as much gold as they possibly could, and they've been adding more gold during this recent time than any other.
Nation out there.
As a matter of fact, we can see that China has been rumored to be laying the foundation for the next world gold standard system. This was written back in twenty sixteen, so they appear to be laying the foundation to bring the world back to the gold standard.
Like it used to be.
For those that don't understand, President Richard Nixon nineteen seventy one cut the ties to the gold standard, so they're saying bring it back to that. Now we can see that China has been buying more and more gold as the trade war drags on. Now this is twenty nineteen. Trade war drags on twenty nineteen. Why is that, Well, in Trump's first term is when the tariffs really started. That's when this trade war started between the US and China, two dominant superpowers, and so this has been going on
for a long time. They've been buying more and more gold as this trade war drags on. Now, how much gold do they have? Well, we can see that number one. We don't really know, but let's do a little bit of math. We know that the US gold holdings officially, officially, the record shows, which by the way, I don't know if it's been audited, shows the US owns about eighty one hundred eight one hundred and thirty three tons of.
Gold in Fort Knox. We want to see that audited. But China's officially declared holdings. This is where it gets sticky.
Officially holdings is one, nine hundred and forty eight tons, make up just three percent of his three point two trillion and four exchange holdings, but the real number is much larger than that.
China has been the world's largest.
Gold producer since two thousand and seven, the largest producer this past decade. It is produced about fifteen percent of all the gold miners in the world. Last year produced three hundred and eighty tons. That's twenty percent more than the world's second largest producer, which is Australia. So not only is it the largest producer, but it's also one of the largest buyers. But I want you to understand
what its policy was. It's key for understanding this. We can see that China has roughly mined about sixty five hundred tons mine sixty five hundred tons. Now, the key behind this is that the gold it mines, it keeps. Exporting of domestic mine production is not allowed. So basically China says, hey, come minu as much gold as you want in China.
But you have to sell it to us.
You can't export that gold. So all of this being produced in China is being bought by China. Chinese mining companies have also been buying assets abroad, So not only have they've been mined in China Sunday China, but they've also been buying assets abroad Africa, South America, Asia, et cetera. The world's biggest producer, China is the world's biggest import So not only are the largest producer and the buyt all,
they're also the biggest buyer. At the same time, over six thousand tons is entered the country since two thousand. Of that cumulat gold production since two thousand, you.
Get to a figure of about thirteen thousand, two hundred tons. This is like back of a napkin math. A lot of it's like hidden. We'll skip ahead here.
We can see that a lot of it doesn't go through the main channels. Since two thousand and eight, roughly twenty thousand tons have been withdrawn from the Shanghai Gold Exchange. So if we add all this up, the rumors are that China could own somewhere between twenty to thirty thousand tons of gold. A small business owner, are you buried in all types of work keeping you from the real thing that makes you money? Well that's where Just Works comes in. They're the all in one platform that supports
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This is twenty fourteen. So we have the two big dogs come into the table.
And the US now is trying to force not just tariffs on them, not just trade tariffs. But this is a monetary shift of monetary restructuring.
Now.
Rumors also are that maybe China's paving the way for a gold back you on, and so they might actually want to back their currency with gold, which then means they sort of in the dollar dominance. Other nations would rather buy a gold back currency like a Chinese yuan. Now, I've done other videos on this. If you want to see that, we'll link to it down below if you want to understand more about that, But that's not the key point.
That we want to dig into right now.
Okay, what we really want to understand is that the last time this happened, as the world shifted to a new monetary standard, China decide to stick with the old standard and they lost a position in the world. Now we're seeing a new monetary evolution while China is still trying to build the previous one.
What am I talking about.
Well, of course, bitcoin has been the best performing asset in the world. It is the most scarce digital asset in the world, and right now we have people, corporations, governments all jumping into it. Now, I will talk about this as an evolution, monetary evolution and the reason why if you look back through thousands of years of history of monetary history, you understand that it's an evolutionary process. So we've had feathers, rock, seashells, all types of things
become money. Eventually gold emerged as the best form money. But it's an evolutionary process. It first starts as a collectible like oh, look at this cool rock, or this cool feather, the cool seashell, Look those cool baseball card or whatever it is. Now some not most collectibles don't, but some become a store of value. So the wealthy store their wealth in collectible. So for example, not all baseball cards, but some baseball cards are worth a lot
of money. Not every painting, but some paintings, some old cards. So some collectibles do become a store of value. Then some things could become a medium of exchange that we use it for exchanges, for buying goods and services, but only if it has the right attributes, which are portable, durable, divisible, recognizable, fungible things like that. So the mona lisa is not divisible, A cow is divisible, but it's not fungible. One like a rabbi is not the same as a liver. A
banana would be no good because it's not durable. But gold fit all of those things. However, it's not very portable, right, It's very hard to move large amounts of gold. So now we understand that bitcoin was a collectible. Oh it's cool, magic Internet money. Today we know that the United States government calls it a store of value and it's put it on the Strategic Reserve. But we also know that it has better attributes that could allow it to become
a meni of exchange. So we're seeing it go through this monetary evolution and we understand that in these technology cycles, we have a fifty year cycle as they reach adoption, and there's two distinct phases. First one was the retail phase twenty ten to twenty twenty.
We're past that.
Twenty twenty to twenty thirty is what we call the institutional phase, where Wall Street comes in, the corporations come in, the sovereigns come in, and we're clearly.
In that phase.
Now we don't know all the implications because we're still in the evolutionary phase. But this is where China's second fatal mistake comes in.
Now.
You see China is they had a scarcity mindset because it's a communist country, so they have to protect their protection. So they can't allow their people to look on the internet to see what other people are doing in other parts of the world. They can't allow other technologies to come in. They have to have this scarcity mindset, so when people start innovating with different things, they can miss out on that they want to stop it before it
takes office, so they missed the innovation. So, for example, they had a lot of bitcoin in China, but they banned it over and over and over. As a matter of fact, China banned bitcoin thirteen times since twenty twelve. Didn't work the first time, the second time, and third time, Well let's try thirteen times.
And it's because it can't be banned, it can't be stopped.
But what they could do, and this is where really the second fatal mistake really kicked in, is that China had over sixty percent of the bitcoin network.
Mining hash power in their country. They had control of it bitcoin miners.
China's cryptocurrency crack down pushes companies overseas.
So they decided to get all of the mining out of China. Now what do they do with gold mining? Whe They're the largest producer and the largest buyer.
So with gold mining, come mine all you want, but sell it to us. They had all the bitcoin mining happening in China, they could have done the same policy, Hey you can mine it.
Here, but you have to sell it to us. But instead they pushed it all out. Now where did it go.
China's kicking out more than half the world's bitcoin miners, about sixty percent, and a whole lot of them could be headed to Texas. So the United States became the main beneficiary of this. And that's why you hear Donald Trump saying, now we want all the bitcoin that's created to be created in America. He has claimed it to be a strategic initiative for the US to be the world dominant leader in bitcoin. Create it here, store it here in the US has moved first partly because we're
not a communist country. We can have innovation. Now we have some of the largest most influential people in the world or in the United States and the world, like Larry Fink from Black Rile, who is the largest asset manager in the world, who has now said that bitcoin is an asset. Bitcoin is a store by asset. We have Scopasent, the new Treasury Secretary was just on Tucker the other day and they said, it is a store value.
Bitcoin is a store value. We have Howard Lutnik. He is the Secretary of Commerce for the new Trump administration. And before I tell you what he said, let's just hear from him directly. Multi billionaire Wall Street fund manager and now the Secretary of Commerce. Let's hear directly from him.
It's the easiest way to get a clear view of where bitcoin is going.
Over the next five years.
Let's take a look at the last five right the last five Bitcoin has been an outsider in the finance business, becoming closer and closer and closer. Right now, there's an ETF just starting to go a little bit mainstream media. You will see all the traditional financial service companies, that big banks, the grograge companies, they're all gonna go headfirst into Bigtin Tom. That's what's going to happen, and it's coming and when that happens, you're going to see bigcoin move.
They're very very strong positive direction.
So that's why I'm a fan of bigtoin.
It's going to go much higher. He always bounces around like any other financial asset. But ultimately, over the next five years, as it gets invited into this party, up we.
Got so you can hear he said that every institution wants to get in and this will just push the price up, up, up. And even the Trump family, his son Eric Trump, was just on TV saying how they're pivoting from real estate, which the Trump name is anonymous with real estate, and they're pivoting into bitcoin. Now, this is all happening right now, and it's not just all of those individuals I mentioned, Like I said, this is
a new global asset. Because now the United States, with the dominant global position as the US dollars the reserve currency of the world, has made it a strategic reserve. They've created a thesis where they said, again, Trump wants it all made here, he wants the US to lead in this, and they're building a strategic reserve of bitcoin.
Now, back to China, they had the dominance, they had the.
Bitcoin there, they had sixty percent of the hash power in their country. But then they kicked it all out. So the US is now home to a majority of the bitcoin hash rate. Now the US is home to public and private reserves of bitcoin. The United States has the dominant upper hand while China is still trying to compete for the old monetary system of gold. The US and the world is moving into something different. And so really, if we look at the situation, it's not just about trade.
It's not just about teriffs. It's monetary wars.
The tariffs are a distraction for what's really going on. The real war is about the monetary system, because whoever controls the money controls the world. Now China keeps banning innovation, they keep stifling it, they keep pushing it out, and so they're not able to take advantage of things like this. It's a real conundrum that countries find themselves in. If we allow the people to be free and have access to the Internet and ideas and information, they may reject
our authoritarian views. But if we don't allow them to have that information, then we stifle our own growth. And they're trying to play that line, if you will, But they keep banning innovation.
But the US is now embracing innovation.
Now. The United States diverted under the Biden administration. It was overly tough on bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general. The Trump administration has gone completely the other way. Now we see bitcoin adoption and the Global Reserve is positioning for it specifically, just like gold before Breton Woods. Now some of you might say, yeah, but can't China just buy it later?
So what if the US moves first? China can just buy it later?
They certainly can, just like China eventually capitulated and boy gold, they certainly can. But China lost its position in the world because it waited until it lost thirty percent of its wealth before doing that. That's where game theory and first move advantage comes in. Now, what does all this mean, Well, what this means is that what's going on right now with the global monetary system is really shaping the next century,
the next one hundred years of power. Just like we saw in the first Fatal Mistake, we're seeing the same thing. We're we're living through monetary history. This is exciting for me because you know how much I love history, and so we're literally living through a period that history of books we'll be talking about, and we get to live through it.
We get a witness it in the real time.
Owning bitcoin is running all of these other nations like China, They're going to come around eventually. We like to say that everyone buys bitcoin at the price they deserve. But you and I get a chance to front run this right now, and we're going to see wealth consolidate before the world catches on, because everyone will come around eventually.
A quote that I say often is that the future is not evenly distributed.
So we have access to information today that the rest of the world is going to catch up to eventually. But it gives all of us a way to consolidate and build.
Our wealth before the world catches on.
Don't be like China. Don't make another fatal mistake with your own portfolio. Instead, be a first mover like bitcoin now. If you'd like to know where I think bitcoin is headed in twenty thirty, twenty forty, and twenty fifty, you might want to.
Watch this video right here.
Otherwise, thumbs up if you like it, thumbs down. If you don't leave me a comment, let me know why. And that's what I got.
To your success.
I'm out.