President Cyril Ramaphosa and US President Joe Biden. Picture: TWITTER
Historian Peter Clarke writes that at the peak of the British Empire: “Enormous areas of the world’s surface were painted red on the map, from arctic Canada to tropical Africa, from the specialist plantation-crop zones of the West Indies and India to the temperate grasslands of Australia and New Zealand, from the Canadian prairies to the SA gold mines — the produce of the world came to British tables, the riches of the world lined British pockets.
As American economist Benn Steil has pointed out, Lord Maynard Keynes, the famed British economist who was the British frontman for the negotiations at the Bretton Woods conference where the IMF and World Bank were born, understood that article VII was in reality a code for an end to the trade preferences that existed between Britain, its colonies and the dominions.
Steil explains that American bitterness towards the economics of the British Empire had been building up long before the beginning of World War 2. Already short of dollars by 1940, Britain negotiated agreements with countries that formed the sterling area, including SA, to pool all their dollar earnings from exports in London and to only use these for essentials from America.
Ramaphosa is Biden's puppet
Just shows you how confused and in a delirium this author is. The 'end of the British Empire'! What is this guy smoking? And Business Day publishes such rubbish? That is why I would never spend a cent to read such dribble!
SA has no self interest ?