US threatens China with an act of economic terrorism.

The global debt Ponzi is a twisted and convoluted things with many parties having different agendas but at the end of the day each party has the same goals: stay in power and keep their people fed.  In fact this is basically just saying the same thing in two different ways because a hungry populace is an angry populace and in fact a desperate one.

The way things are working right now, China needs to keep its people employed.  It has a ton of people, most of which make low wages.  In fact, they don't make enough money to buy most of the stuff they produce.  So their production is exported to those who can pay. 

Sort of.

In fact, all nations of the world are bankrupt and living off their national credit cards.  So when I say "pay" I really mean "promise to pay".  Of course those promises are lies and nobody intends to pay but that is the state of things right now.  Economically speaking, the Chinese people should stop trying to export so much and instead produce what they need in order to feed themselves.  They should only export enough stuff to gain access to the raw materials that they don't already have for themselves.  But their oligarchs cannot get rich under such a fair and honest system and so the people are tricked into building things for others that they themselves cannot afford to consume.  In other words slavery.  That is just how it is right now.

Be that as it may, should China finally decide that dealing with the US as a "customer" in this fraudulent relationship is more trouble than its worth, it will be the US that suffers, not China.  The US is receiving all sorts of quality goods at low prices courtesy of the Chinese and if that stops then US lifestyle will take a BIG step down as supplies dry up and American producers demand much higher prices than Chinese producers.

With this in mind, I think it is crazy that they US is making threats against the hand that feeds it in the form of locking China out of the US controlled SWIFT payment system if China does not follow US demands with respect to North Korea.  Since SWIFT is used to settle payment from the USA and since the USA is a major consumer of Chinese exports, getting locked out of SWIFT would be a massive disaster in the short term for China and could be considered an act of war.  Locking countries out of SWIFT is what we do to terrorist countries, not to those who simply do not want to dance to whatever tune that Uncle Sam wants to play this week.

If this gets too out of hand, China could do like foreign banks have done: it could just decide that the USA is more trouble to deal with than we are worth and then work us out of their business model.

Advantage China in this one IMO.