blert said:

“It’s a fact that China and Russia scheme financial warfare.
Russia figures that it was financial warfare that terminated the Soviet Union. Since we are too close in time for the secrets to get out, who will admit it?
Right now we are in a financial world war IMHO.”

I also find myself wondering about this.

Some background: Many years ago I was managing a supercomputing facility at an Australian university. One day I was chatting with some of our Cray computer technicians about which computers were the fastest in Australia. I was told that at the time the fastest machine in Australia was an 8 headed Cray-YMP operated by the Australian Department of Defence in Canberra. The old Cray-YMPs were designed specifically for nuclear weapons and cryptographic work. So naturally, I asked the technician if Australia was running a nuclear weapons program. He replied that the machine was used for economic warfare. He claimed that the Australian Department of Defence ran economic simulation programs for any nation that was seen as a potential adversary. The purpose of these simulations was to locate weak links in a potential adversary’s economy that would enable a single point attack to cause economic collapse. Anyway, this conversation took place almost 15 years ago.

A modern day Beowulf cluster has a compute capability that is 3 to 4 orders of magnitude greater than an old 8 headed Cray-YMP. It is quite conceivable that George Soros could afford a thousand node Beowulf cluster along with a team of Ph.D. level mathematicians that were running economic simulations. I find myself wondering if some sort of “shadow war” could be taking place where different nations or private economic raiders were trying to overthrow the economies of adversary states through pin-point attacks. Again the timing of the collapse of Lehman Brothers that initiated the current economic crisis and also insured Obama’s election was very suspicious.