Brendan Greeley

I think it's not an accident.

Listen, I don't have any reporting that suggests that this is true.

This is purely assumption on my part.

But I don't think it's an accident that the UAE asked Treasury for the swap line.

and within a week also said, you know what, we're going to leave OPEC, and we're going to pump as much oil as anybody wants in the world, and we're going to drive down the price of oil as soon as we clear up the Strait of Hormuz.

So, you know, China also offers these swap lines, denominated in yuan, right?

So there are some offshore yuan, they're very difficult to measure.

But the existence of the swap lines from the People's Bank of China suggests that these offshore yuan must exist.

The

problem is, and this is really interesting research from Aditi Sahasrabuddha at Brown, has sort of talked to a lot of people around the world about sort of how they feel about these swap lines from China.

And the assumption is swap lines come with political strings attached.

The difference is the Fed basically says, we're not protecting America.

We're protecting the, sorry, they are of course protecting America, but they do that through protecting the global dollar system.

They have a group of central banks that they trust.

In a crisis, no questions asked, they will offer the swap lines if you need them.

That's not saying, okay, European Union, we're going to protect you with these swap lines in your banks, but you got to lower tariffs on American cars, right?

It's just saying, we're just protecting the dollar system.

We'll figure everything else out afterwards.

And I think one of the dangers of the dollar system right now is that these swap lines become politicized.

The ones from the treasury are definitely politicized.