Markets Antiwar?

Nathan Newman nathan at newman.org
Fri Nov 30 11:43:08 PST 2001


----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com>

Nathan Newman wrote:
>Vietnam coincided for most of its period with a great economic boom;
>the stock market and workers wages arguably collapsed starting with
>our withdrawal around 1973.

-You're not thinking like a Wall Streeter, Nathan. Vietnam was an -economic disaster because it unleashed inflation. That inflation -turned Treasury bonds into "certificates of confiscation," as people -used to say. If you take a broad political view of inflation, then -the loss in Vietnam meant a blow to bourgeois control - not only was -there that loss, there was the pushy Third World, OPEC, people in the -streets, etc. It was only with the ascent of Reagan that order was -restored.

Maybe- I actually don't really buy either the story I told or your version, since it seems to me that the crisis of the mid-70s came from many more sources than a little post-Vietnam inflation, from technology cycles to the expansion of the global economic financial markets beyond the management of the US to the wage-labor conflicts of mature developed nations and so on. OPEC of course played a big role as well.

But Reagan restored profitability largely through massive military Keynesianism and union-busting, a twofer for business.

My fondness for Clinton may be seen as reactionary, but a period of largely peacetime economic growth where lower-income workers actually got at least a small bite of the cherry seems worth at least a bit of praise, compared to Carter's semi-Hooverism/Volckerism or four other Democrats (FDR, Truman, Kennedy & Nixon) who had their economic policies built around massive overseas wars.

-- Nathan Newman



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