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AHMADI-NEJAD
The new Iranian President's personality profile
provides another important input to the Iranian challenges the world could
inevitably face, unless, as one SME notes, circumstances change dramatically
or a nuclear take-out of the Islamic Iranian regime occurs.
Israel
seems increasingly willing to undertake action against Iranian facilities and
despite denials,
U.S.
military strategists appear to have a massive conventional bombing plan of some
5,000 specific locations on their charts.
1. Still in his mid-teens when Khomeini took over, Ahmadi-Nejad
is a product of post-revolutionary
Iran
and has no perception of the West except as an enemy to be confounded and
defeated. Studying Urban Development and rising to Mayor of Tehran did not
provide him grounding for even national level concepts, nor has he any foreign
affairs experience at all. His idea to move 25 million Iranians from rural
areas to existing urban locations indicates simplistic, linear thinking.
2. Coming from impoverished circumstances, where his coppersmith father
provided only a minimalist life, the new President has lived off very little
all his life, including a meager military salary. Unlike most senior Mullahs
and their entourages, who over the past 25-years have acquired riches, invested
in overseas real estate and other projects and often have sizeable accounts in
offshore banks, consequently a stake in keeping global economies steady, Ahmadi-Nejad
has nothing to lose or to gain by factoring in "time
wasting" and unfamiliar international components.
3. His strong proclivity to Ayatollah Khomeini's Valiate-Faghi guiding
principles, which propound Islamic clerical rule and dominance of the world
and his dedicated religious conduct as a daily part of his military lifestyle in
the IRGC, easily puts him in the category of a religious fanatic, though
secular in official title.
The underpinning to the problem
is Iranian in nature, but the ability for
Iran
to do serious harm stems more from a combination of global weaknesses.
World currency markets, oil unlinking radically from
the dollar (potentially to some extent through the Iranian Oil Bourse plan) and
the political and personal ambitions of leaders in Europe, Russia, China and the
Islamic world, combine to become a serious peril. Significantly, terrorist
groups have also begun switching from purely bodily or property harm to
attempting to destroy the financial well being of target countries.
Viewed in perspective, emerging anxiety about "neo-Iran"
ponders a bizarre situation, far from wild conjecture, that will require drastic
action to prevent. Existing dynamics might, at best, bring far reaching
doldrums and financial pain to Europe and advanced Western nations, similar to
that encountered in the USA during the Jimmy Carter administration, intertwining
with aspects unrelated to Iran's intentional efforts to cause harm.
CURRENCY
The U.S. Dollar plays the role of the world's primary
currency and nothing else can presently substitute for the dollar's mandatory
use for oil purchase and oil trading, which has to be in dollars.
Nevertheless, based on supply and demand principles,
U.S.
money is about 40-50% overvalued.
Central Banks find themselves crammed with a surplus
of dollars, which they hold beyond logical considerations just to maintain
equilibrium in world trade and commodities – mostly out of self-interest and
self-preservation.
Quite to the contrary, Ahmadi-Nejad and his clique
have neither such compunctions nor personal wealth to protect.
A negative run on the dollar would change the economic
face of the earth and delight the Hojatieh mindset and religious aims of
spreading misery.
A glut of dollar holdings by Central Banks and
among Asian lenders (China reportedly has hundreds of billons in U.S. Treasury
bonds) plus the current low interest rate offered to investor/lenders by the
USA has been putting the dollar in jeopardy for some time.
Including, potentially, by some inexperienced
Third World
central bank employee, who seeing an over stock of dollars in the bank's
currency portfolio, decides to diversify their holdings.
Were that person to offer several billion dollars on
the market, they would trigger a panic sell-off by everyone else. A
twitching finger on currency's hair-trigger can shoot down the dollar without
any purposeful ill intent. Most estimates place the likely drop to
"floor levels" at a rapid 50% loss in value for a presently 40%
overvalued Dollar.
Not too long ago, a mid-level official of the Korean
Central bank casually mentioned currency "diversification"
at an obscure lunch. The U.S. Stock Market fell by 100 points in 15
minutes, because of an implied desire for
Korea
to decrease its dollar holdings. What would the drop have been had he
actually sold dollars?
When a group called "Long Term Capital
Management", a hedge fund of derivatives – something fully understood
by probably less than half a dozen people in the world – failed, U.S. Federal
Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan had to help bail it out to save the dollar
and the
U.S.
economy.
This fund had Nobel Prize winning economists writing
their trading algorithms and top-drawer traders involved and still went
down in flames. What about the expertise level of other hedge funds trading
daily in the
USA
- some 8,000 of them?
About $6,000 Billion (easier to conceptualize as
"huge" instead of a mere "six trillion") worth of
derivatives trade on the international market – daily - so the already
built-in prospect of disaster surpasses all possible defensive safety measures.
Compare this daily volatility to the annual
USA
national budget of approximately $1,900 Billion (less than two trillion) of
revenues and $2,350 Billion (2.35 trillion) in expenditures.
While economists scoff at the currency market being
unable to right itself in the face of fluctuations, if left to its own
devices, introduce into this at best "delicately balanced"
economical environment, a hostile "Hojatieh"
Iran
's lack of any desire or motivation to help prevent global economic mayhem.
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