FT Asia Intelligence Wire
1998 BUSINESSWORLD (PHILIPPINES)
August 18, 1998
Businesswise- United we stand...
January 1, 1999, or in less than five months, the European Union (EU) will adapt the European common currency or the Eurodollar. That will leave the less developed countries, like the Asian countries, on the economic shooting gallery.
With fewer targets, expect currency attacks to be more intense. There will be no more French francs, Italian liras or other European currencies to play around with. There will be less to make in trading the more stable Eurodollar that will have a much broader industrial base. There is always more to gain in trading with currencies that fluctuate over a wide band, like the Philippine peso, the Thai baht and other Asian currencies. Middle East countries have oil and could be tougher adversaries.
By next year, there will be two big boys on the block: the US and the EU. If their economies remain strong, their dollar muscle (or its equivalent in US dollars) will continue to bulge. They will most likely avoid expending the pent up energy upon each other and instead visit weaker turfs.
Instead of worrying about the yen or yuan devaluing, time is better spent on achieving Asian economic unity through a common Asian currency. That will not only protect us from devastating currency attacks but also promote intra-regional trade and investment. . .
Certainly, there are problems to having a common Asian currency. Most Asian economies, in a sense, are starting from zero with no way to go but up. Everyone has to undertake economic reforms and shed the inefficient and shaky entities. United, the afflicted countries can protect against currency shocks better than they can do on their own.
The threat alone of being marked by the world's biggest and prosperous trading blocks, the US and EU, should get the Asian economies to forge Asian economic unity in a hurry. United, we stand a better chance against the stronger economies. Divided, each one of us is easy picking for the moneyed speculators.
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Lenin, "Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism":
Certain bourgeois writers (whom K. Kautsky, who has completely abandoned the Marxist position he held, for example, in 1909, has now joined) have expressed the opinion that international cartels, being one of the most striking expressions of the internationalization of capital, give the hope of peace among nations under capitalism. Theoretically, this opinion is absolutely absurd, while in practice it is sophistry and a dishonest defense of the worst opportunism. International cartels show to what point capitalist monopolies have developed, and the object of the struggle between the various capitalist combines. This last circumstance is the most important, it alone shows us the historico-economic meaning of what is taking place; for the forms of the struggle may and do constantly change in accordance with varying, relatively particular and temporary causes, but the substance of the struggle, its class content, positively cannot change while classes exist. Naturally, it is in the interests of, for example, the German bourgeoisie, to whose side Kautsky has in effect gone over in his theoretical arguments (we will deal with this later), to obscure the substance of the present economic struggle (the division of the world) and to emphasize now this and now another form of the struggle. Kautsky makes the same mistake. Of course, we have in mind not only the German bourgeoisie, but the bourgeoisie all over the world. The capitalists divide the world, not out of any particular malice, but because the degree of concentration which has been reached forces them to adopt this method in order to obtain profits. And they divide it "in proportion to capital," "in proportion to strength," because there cannot be any other method of division under commodity production and capitalism. But strength varies with the degree of economic and political development. In order to understand what is taking place, it is necessary to know what questions are settled by the changes in strength. The question as to whether these changes are "purely" economic or non-economic (e.g., military) is a secondary one, which cannot in the least affect the fundamental views on the latest epoch of capitalism. To substitute the question of the form of the struggle and agreements (today peaceful, tomorrow warlike, the next day warlike again) for the question of the substance of the struggle and agreements between capitalist combines is to sink to the role of a sophist.
The epoch of the latest stage of capitalism shows us that certain relations between capitalist combines grow up, based on the economic division of the world, while parallel and in connection with it, certain relations grow up between political combines, between states, on the basis of the territorial division of the world, of the struggle for colonies, of the "struggle for economic territory."
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)