>
> The USA has the Bubble; the EU and Japan have the banking assets. We'll
> see which is a better long-term strategy, won't we?
But enjoying hegemony is not the same as having a better long-term strategy, is it? Isn't the point that the U.S.' financial hegemony has been about the *forcible assertion* of Wall St.-Treasury- IMF complex's needs and/or desires, not about whether they are actually going to work? I mean, if hegemony were about a really and truly a good long term strategy, U.S. hegemony would have ended a long time ago, say with the second oil shock in the 70's.
While I can understand being skeptical about the U.S. ability to continue on its current course, its fundamental weakness doesn't mean it isn't hegemon, economically or politically. It's because it has the ability and institutions to turn its economic strengths (such as they are) *into* hegemony that it has the position it does apart. While I don't particularly want to see it continue, crisis alone won't end it. There have been lots of threats to its hegemony since the 70's, and the U.S. has managed to turn many of them to its advantage (i.e. here we are).
>
> > In our previous debate, I don't think you were able to show that Japan
> > enjoys any kind of overall monopoly over leading edge technological
inputs
> > (James Galbraith's innovative capital goods) into the production
process.
>
> This confuses technology with accumulation structures here, i.e. an
> innovative product (say, Intel's Coppermine chip) with larger processes of
> technological innovation (science, R & D, education etc.). Leading edge
> tech in the US is still closely tied to the military-industrial complex,
> which is a long-term problem for US capital; East Asia and the EU have
> state-industrial complexes and refined industrial policies, which made a
> mint by "learning from the best and exporting to the rest". In the
> Seventies, EC firms didn't even have digital telecom technology, if I
> recall aright; East Asian firms produced only basic electronics
> components. But they had structures which enabled them to catch up and
> surpass the US on a number of levels. Sure, former metropoles can continue
> to excel in specific niches: a hundred years after the height of its
> Empire, Britain still produced the world's leading jet engines,
> pharmaceuticals and luxury cars. But UK capital is clearly second fiddle
> these days to the power, might and glory that is Eurocapital, n'est-ce
> pas?
All depends on what counts as technology. According to Paul Doremus et al. ("The Myth of the Global Corporation," Princeton 1998), the United States is the only large OECD country to have a positive technology balance of trade for the last 25 years--except for 1986, when the U.K. had one (this is up to 1994). (They measured technology exports by way of international royalty and license fee transactions. Counted it as technical innovation.) Moreover, most technology trade and transfer happens within multinational affiliates. Of the trade that happens at "arms-length" (i.e. coming from non-affiliated corporations), Japan has been the source of most of the U.S. surplus, and has shown less propensity to export its technology. All of which supports the image of "import from the best and export to the rest." But it also suggests that, if U.S. high-tech is tied to the military industrial complex, it doesn't seem to be a problem, unless you want that technology to remain exclusively in the U.S. (This surplus could also reflect the U.S. unwillingness to import, though.) Moreover, the fact that Japan has been able to export some high-tech goods more successfully than the U.S. doesn't tell you anything about whether Japan, Inc. has been able to apply technology (i.e. industrial process knowledge, intellectual innovation etc.) to production better than the U.S. or anyone else.
Besides, at the end of the day, aren't we really *not* talking about Japan's real economic/social advantages or disadvantages, but about their ability/ willingness to turn them into political power?
Christian