Currency Wars_ The Making of the Next Global Crisis - James Rickards [17]
I threw my laptop in my briefcase and ran down to the lobby, trying to get the same Drudge banner on my BlackBerry screen. Steve and O.D. were waiting for me.
“Hey, guys, have you seen Drudge this morning?” I yelled out from a distance. “You won’t believe it.”
I handed the BlackBerry to Steve, who studied the screen and passed it to O.D.
“Amazing,” said Steve. “Those guys at the lab will think we planned the whole thing, like we had inside information. Let’s get over there and show them what’s going on in the world.”
We arrived at the lab, rushed through security as quickly as possible and raced up the stairs of Building 26 to the war room.
Folks were having coffee and quietly chatting about events from the day before. I was fairly certain that the serious military and academic types around us had more important things to do each morning than read Drudge, so our scoop was still under wraps for the moment. I went into the technical support room adjacent to the main war room. The tech room had its own wall-sized screen to preview or troubleshoot what was going on in the war room. I asked the video tech if he could put the Internet up on the big screen and gave him the Web address for Drudge. Within a few seconds our friend Putin was on the screen, larger than life, throwing down the gauntlet at U.S. dollar hegemony. With a few more clicks on the control panel, the Drudge banner now appeared in the war room itself, while the lab staff helpfully printed out the story behind the headline and made sure a copy was placed among the rulebooks and scenarios sitting at every battle station.
Harvard was not amused. He thought Steve and I were being ridiculous and now he thought pretty much the same thing about Putin. But most of the participants were kind enough to give us some kudos for driving the game toward the next big thing before it happened.
Once the Putin buzz died down, it was back to the war game and move three, the final move in the game. This scenario involved the election of a proindependence candidate in Taiwan and an effort to reverse Taiwan’s increasing economic integration with mainland China. There was not much left to do on the gold currency front by now. Russia had made its move, China had refused to go along and the United States acted indifferent, although this seemed strange because in the real world any move toward gold by Russia would have been met with a much more robust reaction by the United States. The U.S. cell was composed entirely of academics, think-tankers and uniformed military, and had no market experience at all, so I had to assume they just didn’t get it when it came to an assault on the dollar. Like most experts I’d spoken to, they probably assumed the dollar would always remain dominant and did not think much about alternative scenarios.
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[conditioned or contingent?]
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We set about preparing our responses to the problem at hand. China reiterated its “One China” policy and warned other nations not to support the Taiwanese initiative. Japan tried to promote an Asian Free Trade Area that would welcome both China and Taiwan as a way to obviate their divisions. The United States emphasized military cooperation with Taiwan but urged that such cooperation in the future would be conditioned on Taiwan’s reducing its confrontational stance. Only Russia continued to play the alternative currency wild card by trying to woo OPEC members in the gray cell to join its gold plan and by suggesting to China that it would be more inclined to take their side in the Taiwan