Okay, count that year. It doesn't change the fact that US GDP growth is still magnitudes above the EU and Japan. At any rate, it's not nearly "about equal."
>While the euro has weakened
> recently (judging by trade and current account surpluses, plus
> consistently high EU productivity increases, the euro is significantly
> undervalued), the appreciation of the Japanese yen during the 1990s has
> more than canceled out the effects of the East Asian recession.
But the East Asian recession sank Japan, which had its highest GNP of the decade right before it, in 1996. Since then macro performance has been dismal. Last year their GDP was negative and currently bankruptcies are at an all time high--which has heightened fears about unpayable debts. Meanwhile, 40% of the capital inflow to the US last year was long-term FDI.
>None of
> this, of course, says anything meaningful about the quality of GDP growth;
> in terms of reducing working hours, social protections, health insurance
> for all, etc. the EU makes the US look like a savage, deindustrialized,
> low-wage semi-periphery.
>
Savage, maybe. De-industrialized and low wage? How do you figure?
>
> In the wide wide world of capital, creditors have the power, debtors
> have interest payments to make, or else they get their assets seized. The
> EU and Japan now have a 2 trillion EUR sledgehammer they can drop on the
> US any time we get out of line. That's real power.
As you yourself have suggested in other places, interest payments made in the world's reserve currency are not just interest payments. And there is nothing to prevent the US from inflating its way out of its debts, if the EU and Japan enter into some sort of endgame. Moreover, neither the yen or the euro is currently poised to take the dollar's place as reserve and/or invoic e currency. Calling in their debts would hurt the EU and Japan--on some order less than the US, for sure. But it would probably smart.
>
> No offence to Perry, who's one of my favorite authors (Lineages of
> the Absolutist State is a shining gem). But if you're going to talk
> about revisioning the Left, you have to talk seriously about the European
> Union and East Asian big biz.
I agree--I love lineages too, and thought the postmodernism book was really interesting. And of course it's necessary to imagine the futures of Europe and Japan. I'm just not sanguine about the wrenching futures ahead for any of them--even in the "best case" scenario of a humiliating US fall from grace.
All best Christian