Charles Jannuzi wrote:
> >
> >> nationalist interests. It seem overvalued stock markets allow American
> >> companies to buy up more than their fair share of the global
capitalist
> >> economies, and then periodic military crises consolidate all the old
ways to
> >> maintain the American imperium.
And there was this response from Dennis.
> >
> >Not quite. The US has been running humongous trade and capital account
> >deficits for decades, meaning it's deeply dependent on the continued
> >inflow of East Asian/EU capital; the Wall Street bubble temporarily
> >papered over this contradiction, but not any more. Given that the US is
> >run by an unelected, braindead oiligarchy in thrall to a bizarre cult of
> >petro-Christianity ("Jesus plus oil derricks"), it makes perfect sense
> >that our elites would declare a holy war on petro-Islam. Local
> >fundamentalisms are the distorted mirror-image of the global ones, which
> >is why each has singled out the other for its pathologic fury.
> >
And Yoshie added:
>
> If you can get away with giant deficits with little negative
> consequences, you are living better than you can otherwise. You
> borrow & consume more than others; others save & produce for you. :->
> Only the hegemon can get away with such profligacy. U.S. imperialism
> is alive & kicking.
Exactly. The US dollar is the de facto world currency, bringing tremendous but largely unacknowledged benefits to the US economy, but most especially its equities markets. Those money flows benefit American interests most. When the US has an economy and population about twice the size of Japan's, but an equity market that exceeds Japan's in value by 6-8 times, are we seeing some of that disconnect we talked about in previous posts?
No one in the world of US-dominated finance or monetary administration listens to Malaysia's PM Mahathir's call for a world currency that doesn't benefit one country.
As for free trade, no one talks the talk in such an effectively propagandistic way as the US, but it also ruthlessly pursues strategic interests in a way no other OECD country does. One difficulty in stably describing this pursuit, though, is it does vary in specifics and emphases from administration to administration.
For example (and this is just one example) , this, and not free markets, is why MS and Intel got to be such profitable monopolists in the 90s. Back in the 80s, at the same time it was decided that the yen should gain value against the dollar, it was also decided that the Japanese would stay the hell out of processor chips and computer OSes (though I use the Japanese OS Tron, which was an open standards OS when Linus Torvalds wasn't even at university) .
Moreover, even as Japan was forced not to invest government money in developing processor chips and the OSes to go with them, the US government invested in a big way. And all those guys like Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy who complain about Bill Gates and MS were of the same ilk and lined up at the same feeding trough.
There are plenty of other signs of what the bubble markets in the US do worldwide right here in Japan. US holding companies have bought into Japanese banking, real estate and insurance--buyouts often in part financed by the Japanese government in the form of debt written off, and, in the case of insurance policy holders, by the policy holders lost dividends.
(As controlling stock holder, US Prudential helped run a demutualized Kyoei into the ground and then took 8% from retirement annuities in order to capitalize a new company , even as it sold off former Kyoei assets for huge profits--I know because I was a Kyoei policyholder. We had no rights as Prudential stole our money.)
Meanwhile, all the present idiot for a PM can talk about is reform and privatization, as if that was going to do anything about a terribly over-valued yen and the deflation that it has caused. But what can you expect when you let the US determine from the very start the content of the discussion?
I still see a pattern: Stock market booms, followed by US expansion of ownership and control within the client states. Military crises then further consolidate alliances such as NATO and the US-Japan 'security' pact. The IMF and World Bank almost completely serve US interests. The WTO does, indeed, often rules against the US (not something played up much in US controlled media), but that's because the idealists at WTO really do believe in trade liberalization beyond US nationalist interests.
I've seen quite a few middle brow theses to explain the fate of the US and the world--some even hit the bestsellers lists (though remain largely unread): empire overreach, end of history according to capitalist utopianism, clash of cultures, and now globalist empire.
But we still haven't got past the American imperium; its just in one of its crisis military mode right now.
Charles Jannuzi