You'd be defending, therefore, an overvalued gold standard which -- until it finally snapped around 1932 -- kept the City of London in (financial) power too long? That's actually the historic equivalent of the IMF/WB, is it not, maintaining an artificial level of social and economic weight, when all around, people want their sovereignty and humanity back?
Sure, it gets very messy when it falls apart, but the point is that given the underlying condition of overaccumulation enormous financial fragility existed anyhow, and the int'l institutional form could not have prevented a serious devalorisation/deflation of either the financial or real sectors.
At that point, if the int'l payments system stops the flows from New York to, say, Jo'burg, so what? We desperately need to get away from international financial flows that are unconnected from (useful/necessary) trade and FDI: hence the growing momentum for a Tobin Tax and restoring what were once widespread national capital controls.
Recall Keynes at precisely that time (in the famous 1933 Yale Review article), getting normative in the same kind of way that our leading internationalist thinkers are, right now:
"I sympathise with those who would minimise,
rather than with those who would maximise,
economic entanglement among nations. Ideas,
knowledge, science, hospitality, travel--
these are the things which should of their
nature be international. But let goods be
homespun whenever it is reasonably and
conveniently possible and, above all, let
finance be primarily national."
This line will become, I'll predict now, the watchword for the NGOs, church leaders, social movements, environmentalists and labour comrades who gather next week in Montreal at the parallel sessions of the Financial Stability Forum... Patrick Bond (pbond at wn.apc.org) home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094 South Africa phone: (2711) 614-8088 work: University of the Witwatersrand Graduate School of Public and Development Management PO Box 601, Wits 2050, South Africa work email: bond.p at pdm.wits.ac.za work phone: (2711) 717-3917 work fax: (2711) 484-2729 cellphone: (27) 83-633-5548