But solid enough, I'm afraid. We'll continue to see a lot of throw-weight deployed around the globe before *this* particular hegemon turns to "two vast and trunkless legs of stone ... in the desert."
> Already in the 1990's, the good performance of
> the US economy and the underlying speculative boom on Wall Street
> have been thoroughly dependent on East Asian money and cheap
> commodities. While the money, in the form of investments and lending,
> has enabled the US economy to keep expanding in spite of a large and
> growing trade deficit, the cheap commodities have contributed to
> keeping inflationary pressures down in spite of economic expansion.
> It is not clear for how long a situation like this can be sustained,
> or how it can be remedied by the United States without bringing its
> own economic expansion to an end.
As always, the $64 trillion question.
Carl