No, and that's. Yet,
Hakki
Com. Hakki,
About "the beauty of the US seignorage scam" you write:
"doesn't it all rest ultimately on confidence, since it's obviously not the low interest rates that are drawing the world's capital to the US? If the media follow FT's lead and start pointing finger's at the emperor's bare ass, what's to stop the global casinogoers from playing at the Euro or the Yen table?"
I think that the dollar's seignorage in places like Argentina is not about American hegemony so much as it is about capitalist hegemony. The dollar is the best place to keep accumulated surplus, is it not? Of that we can, at the moment, be confident. What other currency has the range of liquid investment options and worldwide fungibility? The dollar may have technical problems. So does Microsoft software. But with both there is the dynamic at work of a natural monopoly as well as an enforced monopoly. Everybody wants money they can spend and save the most places. The very concept of money comes from the desire for a uniform standard of exchange. Lesser currencies will, all other things being equal, tend to "leak" into greater currencies. I think the yen or euro *could* compete with the dollar, but they are well behind right now. The most liquid markets for all types of securities and assets seem to be in dollars.
More than that, I'm not sure that people on the left should be trying to stand up for smaller currencies. It's not a battle that's winnable, I think, and it's not clear to me that these currencies provide a refuge for working people. I think they may be more a refuge for crooked and brutal local bourgeoisies. It's always been tempting to me to envision islands of refuge from capitalist oppression but I don't see them. I think the fight is at the center, not the periphery.
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