“We will cultivate a trading center and pricing mechanism that puts China first (以我为主) and actively promote settlement in local currency.” excerpt from the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) 14th five-year plan for 2021–25.
The CCP’s yuan liquidity pool with the Bank for International Settlement is not just a challenge to the dollar, it’s also one more example of China’s increasing influence over global organizations.
The CCP has been trying for years to internationalize the yuan as well as decrease the dollar’s dominance in international trade as both an exchange and reserve currency. On June 25, the People’s Bank of China announced its plan to partner with the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and five other central banks to create a yuan liquidity pool aimed to stabilize economies during periods of market volatility. Apart from the PBC, the founding members of the new pool are Bank Indonesia, the Central Bank of Malaysia, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and the Central Bank of Chile.
Under the terms of the agreement, each member will contribute $2.2 billion worth of dollars or yuan to the pool known as the Renminbi Liquidity Arrangement (RMBLA). The balance will be held by BIS which will release funds to members, in times of need, through a collateralized liquidity window.
Over the decades, BIS has cooperated with the central banks of reserve currency-issuing countries to implement liquidity support packages, which they provide to other nations during times of market stress and instability. The Yuan Liquidity pool is the first such arrangement that has been made using yuan and is a step toward achieving the CCP goals laid out in the 14th five-year Plan. This plan calls for a return to globalization and a gradual internationalization of the currency.
The plan also refers to the “weaponization of finance in recent years,” which is a veiled reference to the U.S. economic sanctions against Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Among those sanctions was a ban that blocked seven Russian banks from using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).
In an attempt to insulate itself from a U.S.-dominated financial system, China created its own SWIFT-like system in 2015 called the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System. In the same year, China managed to have the yuan added to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) special drawing rights currencies. In 2020, U.S. sanctions on CCP officials over the dissolution of Hong Kong’s freedoms accelerated Beijing’s efforts to circumvent the U.S.-led global financial system. To this end, they have been in negotiations with Saudi Arabia to settle oil trades in yuan and to settle trade with Russia in rubles or yuan. There have also been discussions through the Belt and Road Initiative for African countries to increase their yuan reserves and to settle trade with China in yuan.
Russia has served as a cautionary tale for the CCP. Seeing the damage that U.S. sanctions and removal from the SWIFT system can do to an economy, Xi Jinping is redoubling his efforts to create a parallel China-led global financial system. Given the current state of the Chinese economy, with growth projections the lowest in decades, many analysts feel it is unlikely that China would make a move on Taiwan until it has first found a way to function outside of the U.S. system and without dollars.
The U.S. Federal Reserve’s increasing interest rates to combat inflation has attracted investment to the United States, but it has also made borrowing in U.S. dollars more expensive. As the Bank of China has so far refused to raise interest rates, borrowing in yuan may be more attractive for the five member countries of the RMBLA. In August, the yuan’s allocation in the IMF’s special drawing rights currency will be increased to 12.28 percent, a signal that the yuan is becoming internationalized. Currently, the yuan accounts for only 2.14 percent of global payments. As China is a major trading partner of the other RMBLA members, it may become expedient for them to hold more yuan in reserves and to settle trade with China in yuan.
So far, the internationalization of the yuan has been slowed by the CCP’s tight controls on capital flows, manipulation of the currency, and lack of transparency. However, the new cooperation with BIS will put the world one small step closer to yuan globalization while the CCP moves toward its goal of financial independence and a yuan-backed world financial system.
Article by Antonio Graceffo from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
