> I'd be much interested in your take (and Dennis') on Halevi and
> Lucarelli, "Japan's Stagnationist Crises"
> http://www.monthlyreview.org/0202halevi.htm in the current (February)
> Monthly Review.
Three points: H&L claim, "The U.S. must borrow money to finance its trade deficit, and the Japanese have been the primary lenders."
Not true. East Asia and the EU+Switzerland have been pretty equal lenders; the ECB's figures on the Eurozone's capital account surplus make this clear. In the early 1990s, Japan bought lots of US assets, but in the late 1990s it was Eurofirms making acquisitions.
Second point: H&L say, "The Japanese domestic market itself could not act as the engine of growth as long as real wages lagged behind productivity growth."
Again, not so. Credit growth can make up the difference indefinitely, as was the case during the US Bubble.
Point 3: H&L say, "Germany was able to protect the profits realized abroad from the devaluation of the dollar by using its hegemony in Europe. "
Hegemony, my foot. The EC taxed the rich and spent on poor countries, internal social democracy boosted wages, and the EC later became the EU, which even invented a multinational bank, the EIB, to finance its periphery. All achievements of the Central European working-class, not the cybernetic spiders of Deutsche Bank, spinning their money-webs.
-- Dennis