>I have no idea what "financial stabilizing" is supposed to mean with
>respect to excess capacity in South Korea, Thailand and Japan.
It means that currency, stock, and credit markets are ceasing to behave like the end of the world is near, and owners of financial capital are no longer racing for the security of U.S. Treasury paper. The scramble for cash (or cash-equivalents like government paper) is an essential aspect of any economic/financial crisis, and that phase seems to be passing. Like I said the other day, it took the U.S. 5 years to recover after the RTC was established, and recovery in Japan may take that long, but the bailout bill - like Roosevelt's bank holiday - could be the end of the crisis phase and the beginning of recovery. I'm not saying this is certain, or that things couldn't get worse. I'm only arguing that people should entertain the possibility that there is not going to be a true global deflationary collapse.
Overcapacity is relative. If Japan could grow even 2-3% a year a lot of bad loans would no longer be bad and a lot of capacity would no longer be excess.
Leo Panitch made an interesting point (well, many) in a seminar today. He said that you could look at the IMF as strengthening the Korean (bourgeois) state rather than weakening it, but enabling it to do things (like crush labor and modernize/Americanize the finance/governance system, though he didn't give these examples himself) that it couldn't do on its own.
Since Asia is undergoing the depression that the U.S. and other top dog countries do everything to avoid at home, it may re-emerge quite strongly in a few years. The crisis may also wake up the Japanese ruling class and convince them to assemble a regional empire, like they're doing with their regional aid fund.
>The issue is not "Armageddon." It is rather the end of the Asian tiger
>paradigm. You were stuck in that paradigm for as long as I can remember,
>arguing that these countries had something in common with the capitalism of
>England of the 1840s, which inspired those passages in the Communist
>Manifesto you are so fond of quoting.
Actually I think you've quoted them more often than I have.
>This was a false premise. The growth
>in East Asia was fueled by excess capital that could find no profitable
>outlet in the West. When the speculative bubble was pricked, the capital
>fled elsewhere.
You can't reduce East Asian growth to the misadventures of idle Western capital, even if you include Japan as part of the "West." Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia industrialized in a pretty dependent fashion, but Taiwan and Korea are forces on their own, with plenty of home-owned, home-grown capital and technology.
>Finally, Mark Jones did not talk about Armageddon. He simply predicted that
>capitalism would go into a signficant slump, especially in Russia.
Russia is a wreck, no one can argue with that, and it's been sliding since about 1989. Just the other day, though, Mark was talking about depressions in the UK and US. While possible, I don't think they're very likely.
>This led you to comment
>that "everything was groovy." Everything is not groovy, Doug.
I must have been under the influence of something. Of Wallace Stevens' menu of possibilities, I always chose an unhappy people in an unhappy world.
Doug