Before I begin, let me inform those who do not know; I am finishing my diss this year as grad student in the Dept of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley whose companion is an asst prof here.
1. I do name drop; I feel so guilty after having done so I am forced to actually read what I have cited. It disciplines the mind.
2. End to national competition?
A. The use of international division of labor, e.g., the world car, by competing multinationals does not ipso facto mean that 1. corporate practices converge on one global model (see new book by Simon Reich, et al. or at least the first 50 or so pages) and 2. national competition has abated or even not intensified (as underlined by the new rash of dumping charges by US corporations or the assault on national ownership rights in Asia--a massive global centralization of capital that you suggest is insigificant, forgetting that imperialism remains the political expression of the centralisation of capital on a world scale).
B. transnational mergers are not proof of 2b: the point of such mergers may be to consolidate position at home so the merged company can engage against a third competitor or European mergers may have their driving force in competition from American capital, e.g., European mergers in the defense industries.
C. the world is not breaking up into self enclosed regions--this again reveals your one sided formal apprehension of the nature of things; for example the point of NAFTA is to provide US capital with a protected market in which to reap superprofits so that it may subject its rivals in other markets to ruinuous competition or that it may blackmail its rivals to give up access to their markets in order to access the North American market-- a genuine free trader like Jagdish Bhagwati raised this concern years ago. If he, a thoroughly bourgeois ideologue can see this, why can't a practical hands on bidnessman like you get a clue?
D. that monopolies may not be able to call upon the state to use monetary policy or price stabilization to their benefit does not mean that the state will not support the imperial expansion of monopoly capital in other forms.
Your rosy peaceful world of global capitalist integration, albeit at a high level of inequality, will not materialize. You seem to hope that the world will evolve to the model in Vol I of Capital--only workers on one side and capital on the other with no internal differentiation. But you won't get such a beautiful dialectic in the real world which will instead by wracked by intra capital conflict all along the way as people are sacrificed in slaughterous competition on the world market.
The bourgeois world is not only more violently destructive than you imagine, HENRY C K; it more destructive than a bourgeois fixed on hedging strategies for firms undertaking FDI could imagine.
You think imports from the third world are insignificant in relation to US GDP; but you never consider that US "production" in retailing and advertising--that sizable part of the GDP-- is often only value deducted from these consumer and intermediate good imports, bought well under value, that are now ravishing the industrial heartland though there are jobs in the circulation of these imports. And you seem never to have heard of the debate Adrian Wood commenced about whether the unemployment effects from third world imports have been underestimated for various reasons--see Galbraith's index.
You paint the US as an island entirely on to itself, playing no aggressive role in the world and little affected by goings on elsewhere.
By the way, the monetary theory of overinvestment and crisis you sketch to explain how the pegged exchange rate system in Hong Kong led to very low interest rates and thus overinvestment seems roughly similar to Hayekian theory (I am not saying that I actually do understand what you were getting at or that I agree.) By the way, Paul Krugman provides a response to Austrian liquidation theory. Krugman conflates Hayek's and Schumpeter's theories despite their important differences; accuses Hayek of not having thought of a problem he gave considerble attention to (why a sudden shift to consumption as savings are no longer forthcoming to finish more roundabout methods necessarily means there must be unemployment); and proposes his own liquidity preference theory of recession in a few words.
While Hayek's "exogeneous" monetary theory of is surely inferior to Schumpeter's which itself is based on the mad idea of mad men heroically breaking through a non existent value based equilibrium every once in a while, Krugman's "critique" is a pretty sad performance, something that would have probably got laughed out of court as an undergraduate paper by someone like Meghnad Desai, a sort of Marxist economics professor at London School of Economics.
But it gives you a sense of the taste for theoretical argument in the US economics profession. Jeez, I don't Laura Tyson ever defined capital in my Econ I course, much less mention the Austrian-Post Keynesian Controversy. Much less Marx or Veblen. It's the narrowest apologetics imaginable. You have to a high respect for authority to continue in a discipline where no attempt is made to clarify in a critical and profound manner the basic concepts. But no wonder Economics is attracting more and more people along with Depts of Criminal Justice. Authoritarianism and obsequiousness--those remain the fundamental problems.
I thank you for the reading recommendation of Fareed Zakaria, now trying to give his slimy brown imprimatur to imperialist despair about the explosion of global poverty in a world left to rot. Who will you recommend next? Max Boot, deputy editor for the Wall Street Journal. I have had the privilige of meeting both, and I am glad to have been reminded of it.
Yours, Rakesh