Pentagon, bankers, prepare for financial warfare
The Politico reports that the Pentagon invited a host of banking and investment experts to participate in a war game anticipating how foreign countries or rogue entities might try to cripple the U.S. financial system. Participating professors, hedge fund managers, and bank executives were separated into five teams — the United States, Russia, China, "East ...
The Politico reports that the Pentagon invited a host of banking and investment experts to participate in a war game anticipating how foreign countries or rogue entities might try to cripple the U.S. financial system.
The Politico reports that the Pentagon invited a host of banking and investment experts to participate in a war game anticipating how foreign countries or rogue entities might try to cripple the U.S. financial system.
Participating professors, hedge fund managers, and bank executives were separated into five teams — the United States, Russia, China, "East Asia," and "Others." They sat at tables facing large screens with streaming financial data. Then, the Department of Defense staffers would simluate a "global calamity," such as the "collapse of North Korea, Russian manipulation of natural gas prices, and increasing tension between China and Taiwan." The result?
At the end of the two days, the Chinese team emerged as the victors of the overall game – largely because the Russian and American teams had made so many moves against each other that they damaged their own standing to the benefit of the Chinese….
[One participant says] the event left him questioning one prevailing assumption about economic warfare, that the Chinese would never dump dollars on the global market to attack the US economy because it would harm their own holdings at the same time. Bracken said the Chinese have a middle option between dumping and holding US dollars – they could sell dollars in increments, ratcheting up economic uncertainty in the United States without wiping out their own savings. “There’s a graduated spectrum of options here,” Bracken said.
One final detail: the name of the game was, erm, "WALRUS," an acronym for the "Warfare Analysis Laboratory Registration and User Website." If the Pentagon’s going to envision further collapse, something like "BARTER ECONOMY" might be more fitting.
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