Tentacles of the Eurostate

[Dennis R Redmond]

Well, the euro (or something like it) is upon us. What does this mean for
the world-economy? Wall Street would have us believe that the dollar is
king, the welfare state is doomed, and Bill Gates will eat European
industry for breakfast. But maybe Wall Street has the US at the wrong end
of the global food chain. The January 1998 Bank for International
Settlements release of bank lending in the global economy (available at
www.bis.org) sheds some interesting light on this. For one thing, the
euro-countries (the ones actually going ahead with the single currency, as
opposed to the EU proper or, for that matter, the entire European economic
zone) just happen to be the biggest bank lenders in the world, and not
just in the places you'd expect, like the Middle East or Eastern Europe.
Here are some of the percentages of debt owed by each economic region to
the banks in question:

Debtor                            Creditor bank located in:
region                     Euro-countries   Japan     UK     USA
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Asia (excluding                 33.1%       31.8%    7.6%    8.3%
Hong Kong and 
Singapore) 
Hong Kong                       31.2%       39.3%   13.5%    4.0%      
Singapore                       41.7%       30.8%   12.0%    2.5%
Middle East                     48.2%        5.8%    9.8%    8.9%
Eastern Europe                  66.4%        3.3%    1.8%   10.1%   
Latin America                   43.3%        5.8%    6.7%   24.0%
Africa                          29.3%        6.4%    9.2%   12.0%

Remarkably, the Eurobloc owns more of China's debt (36.5%) than Japan does
(32.3%). Even neocolonized Mexico, the debt-ridden protectorate of the
Americans, turns out to owe the Euro-banks more than US banks: 35.3%
versus 28.4%, respectively (that's got to be *so* galling to
CitiTravelers).

Admittedly, these figures don't include things like grants, Government
loans and things like that; but of course Europe spends a higher
percentage of its GDP in develoment assistance to the rest of the world
than the US. Also, the BIS charts don't give any details of the total debt
holdings of the Swiss banks, which are surely enormous; the Swiss banks
are the financial core of the Eurobourgeoisie, if not yet the Eurostate. 

Two conclusions are to be drawn here:

(1) Globally, the EU owns the world-system, and can (and will) do anything
it damn well pleases.

(2) Locally, it's a good idea to sell your dollars now and buy euro and
yen, before the Wall Street bubble bursts, as it inevitably must. 

-- Dennis