據美國媒體報導，美國退役海軍陸戰隊員、目前任職於美國國防部的Franz Gertsch 弗朗茨·蓋爾之前在中國大陸媒體《環球時報》上發表文章，他在文中表達了反對美國在台灣問題上與中國公開對峙的言論，因此，他遭到美國軍方反情報調查，可能會提前失去公職.
看到這個消息，筆者感到有些驚訝。美國整天強調所謂的言論自由、資訊自由。因為Franz Gertsch發表了兩篇與美國政府立場不一致的文章， 就遭受到反情報調查，難道講民主自由人權的美國政府連兩篇清楚標註謹代表作者個人觀點的文章也容不下嗎?
事實上，類似情況在美國很多， 幾年前美國人Snowden 司諾登揭發美國政府監控全球通訊的消息，他因此被美國政府通緝。在新冠肺炎疫情期間，我們看到三位美國專家～為美國國內疫情吹哨的西雅圖的傳染病專家海倫·Y·朱Helen Y. Chu博士醫生、懇請衛生部門為疑似病人檢測的McCarthy麥卡錫醫生、寫信呼籲撤離“羅斯福”號航母艦上官兵的Brett Crozier克羅澤爾艦長等許多人向美國政府諫言，他們僅僅因為說了真話，發出同政府不一致的聲音，就遭到了美國當局強制噤聲或被調查撤職。
美國監控全球通訊，這符合公平正義原則嗎？這符合哪一條國際規則秩序呢？因為寫了一封信呼籲趕緊撤離羅斯福號航母艦上官兵的 Crozier
克羅澤爾艦長被撤職了！但他是要拯救艦上幾千名官兵的生命，按照美國的所謂價值觀，他應該是英雄，而不應該被懲戒呢！
另外，早前有美國之音記者在武漢採訪疫後社會，內容客觀中肯，但美國當局認為報道沒有攻擊中國政府，所以此記者是在為中國宣傳，他也被撒職。
由上述的事實可以看到美國當局對言論的管制是非常嚴厲的，犯了美國利益大忌的必被懲罰。 因此，當美國講言論自由或者指責其他國家言論自由被侵犯時，我們是需要笑一笑就可以了，置諸不理即可。
反而在香港, 一直以來，很多傳媒丶電台主持人，他們不斷地違反一國兩制原則， 不停地幫美國等西方國家政客攻擊中國丶攻擊特區政府， 從來不批評美國英國等國家違反人權丶警暴之事。 但是，隨著國安法在香港落實，政府有法理依據去進行處理了。
梁叔明 工程師
香港建設專業聯會理事
香港建設專業聯會
** 博客文章文責自負,不代表本公司立場 **
The Dollar’s Fragile Hegemony
By KENNETH ROGOFF
Kenneth Rogoff, is the Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University and recipient of the 2011 Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics, was the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003. He is co-author of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly and author of The Curse of Cash. He says, "Today, it seems to be an article of faith among US policymakers and many economists that the world’s appetite for dollar debt is virtually insatiable. But a modernization of China’s exchange-rate arrangements could deal the dollar’s status a painful blow."... see it as follows...
The mighty US dollar continues to reign supreme in global markets. But the greenback’s dominance may well be more fragile than it appears, because expected future changes in China’s exchange-rate regime are likely to trigger a significant shift in the international monetary order.
For many reasons, the Chinese authorities will probably someday stop pegging the renminbi to a basket of currencies, and shift to a modern inflation-targeting regime under which they allow the exchange rate to fluctuate much more freely, especially against the dollar. When that happens, expect most of Asia to follow China. In due time, the dollar, currently the anchor currency for roughly two-thirds of world GDP, could lose nearly half its weight.
Considering how much the United States relies on the dollar’s special status – or what then-French Finance Minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing famously called America’s “exorbitant privilege” – to fund massive public and private borrowing, the impact of such a shift could be significant. Given that the US has been aggressively using deficit financing to combat the economic ravages of COVID-19, the sustainability of its debt might be called into question.
The long-standing argument for a more flexible Chinese currency is that China is simply too big to let its economy dance to the US Federal Reserve’s tune, even if Chinese capital controls provide some measure of insulation. China’s GDP (measured at international prices) surpassed that of the US back in 2014 and is still growing far faster than the US and Europe, making the case for greater exchange-rate flexibility increasingly compelling.
A more recent argument is that the dollar’s centrality gives the US government too much access to global transactions information. This is also a major concern in Europe. In principle, dollar transactions could be cleared anywhere in the world, but US banks and clearing houses have a significant natural advantage, because they can be implicitly (or explicitly) backed by the Fed, which has unlimited capacity to issue currency in a crisis. In comparison, any dollar clearing house outside the US will always be more subject to crises of confidence – a problem with which even the eurozone has struggled.
Moreover, former US President Donald Trump’s policies to check China’s trade dominance are not going away anytime soon. This is one of the few issues on which Democrats and Republicans broadly agree, and there is little question that trade deglobalization undermines the dollar.
Chinese policymakers face many obstacles in trying to break away from the current renminbi peg. But, in characteristic style, they have slowly been laying the groundwork on many fronts. China has been gradually allowing foreign institutional investors to buy renminbi bonds, and in 2016, the International Monetary Fund added the renminbi to the basket of major currencies that determines the value of Special Drawing Rights (the IMF’s global reserve asset).
In addition, the People’s Bank of China is far ahead of other major central banks in developing a central-bank digital currency. Although currently purely for domestic use, the PBOC’s digital currency ultimately will facilitate the renminbi’s international use, especially in countries that gravitate toward China’s eventual currency bloc. This will give the Chinese government a window into digital renminbi users’ transactions, just as the current system gives the US a great deal of similar information.
Will other Asian countries indeed follow China? The US will certainly push hard to keep as many economies as possible orbiting around the dollar, but it will be an uphill battle. Just as the US eclipsed Britain at the end of the nineteenth century as the world’s largest trading country, China long ago surpassed America by the same measure.
True, Japan and India may go their own way. But if China makes the renminbi more flexible, they will likely at the very least give the currency a weight comparable to that of the dollar in their foreign-exchange reserves.
There are striking parallels between Asia’s close alignment with the dollar today and the situation in Europe in the 1960s and early 1970s. But that era ended with high inflation and the collapse of the post-war Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. Most of Europe then recognized that intra-European trade was more important than trade with the US. This led to the emergence of a Deutsche Mark bloc that decades later morphed into the single currency, the euro.
This does not mean that the Chinese renminbi will become the global currency overnight. Transitions from one dominant currency to another can take a long time. During the two decades between World Wars I and II, for example, the new entrant, the dollar, had roughly the same weight in central-bank reserves as the British pound, which had been the dominant global currency for more than a century following the Napoleonic Wars in the early 1800s.
So, what is wrong with three world currencies – the euro, the renminbi, and the dollar – sharing the spotlight? Nothing, except that neither markets nor policymakers seem remotely prepared for such a transition. US government borrowing rates would almost certainly be affected, though the really big impact might fall on corporate borrowers, especially small and medium-size firms.
Today, it seems to be an article of faith among US policymakers and many economists that the world’s appetite for dollar debt is virtually insatiable. But a modernization of China’s exchange-rate arrangements could deal the dollar’s status a painful blow.
You may see in the Second paragraph, the professor says, in Chinese, "出於多種原因，中國當局可能會在某一天停止將人民幣與一籃子貨幣掛鉤，並轉向允許匯率更加自由浮動（尤其是兌美元匯率）的現代通脹目標制。一旦出現這種狀況，亞洲大部分地區很可能都會追隨中國。屆時，目前作為全球約三分之二國內生產總值（GDP）錨定貨幣的美元，可能會失去近一半權重。", to be frank, It is possible, not far away.
S. L. LI Engineer
HKFDP
