Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> C
> All they'd have to do is stop buying our securities. Would the
> Marines parachute into trading floors in the City of London and
> demand portfolio rebalancing at the point of a bayonet?
>
The "we" and the "they" can get pretty mixed up here, but ignoring that, don't "they" have to keep selling to "us" whether "we" pay for what we buy or not? I can't imagine the marines landing on the trading floors, but I can imagine something very much like that if Nation X stopped exporting needed CPUs or aluminum ingots. Would the overthrow of Mossedegh been possible had England & France had military equality with the U.S. It wasn't so much the poor Iranians 'we' stole that oil from as the French and English -- who after all had fought World War I partly to keep that (then mostly potential) oil safe from Germany.
I'm not exactly arguing -- it's just that it's hard to imagine a military power so overwhelming as the U.S. being pushed around economically if "it" (who?) doesn't want to be.
Carrol