Messi’s snub of China was not a misunderstanding. It was deliberate — a declaration of allegiance, a statement of position, a pledge of loyalty. It reveals personal ambition and the clash of opposing camps.
The Argentines, in their pain and frustration, have chosen a path unlike any before — one actually tried across the former Soviet states in the 1990s. There is a specific term for it: shock therapy. We all know how that turned out. In the early stages, the internal economic spiral caused by currency instability and insufficient capital for consumption and production would be immediately halted. Argentina is a country rich in physical assets — to put it plainly, they have the resources. But the pricing power over those resources doesn’t belong to them.
This is exactly like having no control over the value of your own labor: you work incredibly hard, but the compensation your effort can earn is not yours to determine — because you don’t hold the pricing power over your own labor. So others can set a very low price for what you do. Your labor goes undervalued. No matter how diligent you are, you remain poor.
Let me give you another example to make this clear: a farmer tilling his land barely earns 1,000 yuan a month. He’s strong and capable — so why only 1,000? Because the pricing of his labor’s final output is not in his hands. Whether it’s rice or wheat he struggles to grow, or the pigs, sheep, cattle, and chickens he raises — the prices of these goods are determined by market supply and demand. And the costs of feed, fertilizer, pesticides, and seeds? Also not his to decide — also set by market forces. So the pricing of his labor value falls even further outside his control. No amount of diligence changes a thing.
Yet if that same man goes to a big city to deliver parcels, he can easily earn 10,000 yuan a month. Same effort, same person, same level of education. Why is the second type of labor worth ten times more than the first? The answer lies in pricing power.
Why is it that every country supplying bulk commodities and raw materials lacks pricing power over its own goods — while commodity and energy prices are set entirely by Wall Street? Think about why. Think about how it got this way. That question leads you straight to the heart of the matter.
All global trade must be settled in US dollars, conducted according to rules and procedures set by those who control the system. If any major seller refuses to comply, they get eliminated. Saddam Hussein is the most authoritative example. He simply announced that Iraq would settle its oil exports in euros. Iraq was the world’s fourth-largest oil producer. What followed were two Gulf Wars waged against him. He was destroyed. The first act of the new government that replaced him was to switch Iraq’s oil settlement back to dollars.
When both buyers and sellers must transact in dollars and follow the rules of the dollar settlement system — and when global commerce must pass through the nine major sea lanes controlled by the US military — and when the United States is also the world’s largest consumer market, making its consumption your orders — then Wall Street, while allocating resources and holding pricing power, gets to play the authority who instructs you on the correct way to run an economy. Your professionals are all trained in their methods. Every mental framework operates within the boundaries they have set. And Hollywood continuously packages all of this into an ideology, distributed to every person on earth through media networks controlled by that same capital. Within this tightly interlocking web of nested dependencies — who dares step out of line? Who dares question? Can you afford not to comply? X7: The Economic Order! laid all this out in detail long ago, and noted: every action exists to improve one’s position within the economic order.
Pricing power over goods, services, energy, minerals, and raw materials — in their hands. Control of trade routes — in their hands. The rules — set by them. Even the standards for right and wrong — determined by them. What can you do? Go back to picking cotton in the plantation fields. Your greatest hope is that the slave master lays off the whip a little. Otherwise, even the other slaves will brand you a troublemaker. As long as you don’t challenge their interests — as long as you stay small, obedient, and compliant — the master will call you gentle and kind. But the moment you resist, you become a villain with twisted motives and a repulsive face. When others tell you to think of the bigger picture, you’re definitely not part of the picture. When others tell you to spare no cost, you are the cost. Hard words — but that’s the truth. It has been so throughout history, across all civilizations. Human society has always worked this way.
Wall Street’s capital engineered a war, planning to sweep up the largest hard assets in one stroke — energy, grain, and natural resources. Instead it became a war of attrition. Russia wasn’t swallowed whole. Blackstone Capital had to settle for picking up the remaining assets in Ukraine — including grain, industrial assets, and infrastructure. Russia’s wheat output is double that of all of Europe. Ukraine’s wheat output ranks third in Europe. The Mariupol steel mill was the number one producer in Europe. There’s no shortage of valuable things — and there are still the underground minerals and coal. These tangible assets can provide real backing for the ever-expanding supply of US dollars. Economics textbooks told us: fiat currency must be backed by something real — something with genuine use in production and daily life — otherwise it is just paper. For those who haven’t had the benefit of higher education, let me put it plainly: you draw a symbol on a piece of paper and declare it currency. It is still worthless paper, because it lacks value backing. But if you take that worthless paper and use it to buy steamed buns — meaning the bun seller is willing to exchange his buns for your paper — it gains value. Because buns can be eaten; they are commodities with real productive and practical worth. When he exchanges buns for your paper, that exchange transfers the buns’ value into your paper as backing. If a fried dough vendor is also willing to do the same, your paper has even more backing. And if the bun seller and the dough vendor are willing to exchange your paper between themselves — then your paper is real currency. Because it not only has genuine value backing, it also circulates.
Now you understand why the Americans force all bulk commodity trading, energy transactions, and international trade to be settled in dollars.
Refuse to comply, and they come at you hard. But as long as everyone uses dollars, everyone is using their own produced goods and services, their own energy and mineral resources — everything of real productive value — to provide backing for America’s paper.
Russia didn’t get its big meal this round. Ukraine’s volume isn’t enough to back the massive new supply of dollars that has been printed. So over the past year, American capital has flooded into Japan — because Japan’s domestic economy has been stagnant for thirty years, but externally it has accumulated enormous real wealth. The six major Japanese trading companies alone hold substantial equity stakes in resource mines around the world.
America ate well this round. Now they are busy driving up the price of what they hold, waiting for certain buyers to come and take it off their hands. Japan and Ukraine still can’t get enough. So what’s the solution? That’s why Argentina — on the verge of joining the premium club — has become especially enticing.
In all likelihood, everything of value in Argentina will quickly be dollarized and absorbed by Wall Street. That is shock therapy: let everything collapse on its own, proactively strip and sell off all assets, convert public property into private hands. Within a few years, oligarchs will be everywhere — oligarchs whose interests are tightly bound to Wall Street. To protect their wealth from an enraged public, those oligarchs will either step forward themselves or prop up some popular puppet to face the crowd.
If an actor can play that role, why not a football star? This is precisely Messi’s calculation and ambition — he is pledging his allegiance. In a place like Argentina, rich in resources, whichever side you join becomes a significant weight on the scale. The economist who just visited the Wailing Wall — and actually wept there. You can say America is ruthless, but you cannot say America is incompetent. Their ability to exploit every opening, to leverage small bets for massive returns, and to control the narrative — these are genuinely impressive. Worth studying.
“Messi sold Argentina out!”