Ya Baby...$1 Drop In A Minute Ish

Having some nukes would give them the power to intimidate most of their neighbors and that is a fine goal in their eyes. Iran is an island floating on a sea of petroleum. They have as much need for nuclear-electric power as a fish does for a bicycle. Will be interesting to see how the next several months go on this.



Do they? Or do they just see it as a means to an end? If that end can be achieved, even at significant cost to them, they might give it a shot and then hope to recover economically at their leisure. Three things that we know for sure about the Chinese is that they are: 1) the #1 gold producer in the world; #2) the #1 gold importer in the world; and 3) encouraging their people to invest in silver and gold. It's almost as if they realized that fiat currency and the economies based on them are either toast or soon will be.



Maybe and maybe not. Don't look now but while the USSR is toast, the Russians are back bigger and better than ever. They have a HUGE resource base and now that communism is not holding them back they are on a tear, economically and financially. A Russia-China cooperative economic organization would be incredibly powerful. I'm sure that they are both aware of this and working hard to exploit it.

How would you like to have $50 si as your first buy?

This is something that a dictator NEVER does as they all realize that the army is the only thing that keeps them in power. Even the idiots running North Korea make sure that their army is well equipped and fed, unlike the rest of the country outside the ruling class and their sycophants.



Having watched and studied the problems in the ME for 40+ years, I can say that none of Iran's neighbors, with the possible exception of their lap-dogs in Syria and Lebanon, wants Iran to go nuclear. At the same time, none of them wants Iran to be mad at them... so they will very quietly root for the West in private while publicly supporting Iran verbally. For them to participate in an actual attack on Iran, with an uncertain outcome and them being seen on the same side as Israel, would be a combo than none of their governments would survive and they know it.



A LOT of their former glory was bluff, bluster, and bull-oney. Their economy never was very good and it got steadily worse as time went on. Today, their economy is solidly built on oil, timber, gas, diamonds, titanium, chromium, gold, and other raw materials. Yes, they now have a smaller country but it is FAR better off economically than it was back in the USSR days. Their military is also smaller but of higher quality than before. All this is in relative terms, of course. Russia is NOT any place I want to live.

Parts of the USSR military was highly trained. But they also had a LOT of troops in the cannon-fodder class. Their pilots had to rely on their "controllers" to think for them and in a jet-powered dog-fight there is no time for that.

I do not think that it is an accident that the Russians AND the Chinese are both hoarding gold, big-time. There is only one reason that makes sense to be doing this and that is if they see a time coming when there are gold-backed currencies again. Having gold is one thing but actually using it for gaining political and economic power is quite another. The next few years will, indeed, be "interesting times".