IMO NF exaggerates the US budget problem. The trade deficit suggests a nasty "hard landing" recession in the future, but the wealthy can ride those things out.
mbs
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]On Behalf Of Charles Brown Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2006 12:52 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: [lbo-talk] Niall Ferguson bewails US imperial decline
Doesn't the U.S. have this deficit thing taken care of with other countries ( China and others) left holding the bag, so to speak, can't cash in their U.S. treasury notes, or whatever.It's imperalism 2006 : U.S. plays "debtor-deadbeat" nation to China left holding the bag of "Confederate" treasury notes , tee hee. Instead of exporting capital, the new imperialism is import capital , and set it up such that your creditors can't collect their loans from you. (See Michael Hudson's _Super-Imperialism_).
Charles
^^^^^
Max B. qutoed:*
"The second constraint on America's unstated empire is the U.S. budget deficit. The costs of the war in Iraq are proving significantly higher than the administration forecast: $290 billion since the invasion in 2003. That figure is not much in relation to the size of the U.S. economy-less than 2.5 percent of gross domestic product-but it has clearly proved insufficient to achieve the swift postwar reconstruction that might have averted today's incipient civil war. Other spending priorities, such as the ballooning unfunded liabilities of the Medicare system, have precluded the Marshall
Plan for the Middle East that some Iraqis had hoped for."
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