Dennis Redmond sez: >The bailout funds won't come from the periphery, but from the global semi-periphery. The latter has sixty percent
>of the world's population, and owns somewhere around 6 trillion EUR of rocksolid forex and sovereign wealth assets.
>Right now, it looks like the EU is implementing Project SuperSweden - recapitalizing its banks, guaranteeing all deposits,
>and triaging defunct institutions, in exchange for ownership stakes. They'll ride out the storm with minimal damage,
>the question is how bad things get for the US. And they could still get very, very bad indeed, if that semi-periphery
>stops buying T-bills.
I say: Maybe. I'd like to think that the light at the end of the tunnel is a final break with dollar hegemony. After all, the dollar- denominated value of my salary since arriving in South Korea has dropped by 20% (and by 40% since I agreed to come here). OTOH, my life savings are deposited in dollar-denominated accounts, as is also the case with most if not all LBO- listers... But anyway, returning to big picture issues, what do you make of the following items? 1) The dollar gained internationally when it looked like financial meltdown on Wall Street would precipitate solvency disasters and liquidity crunches across the world, and there was -- ironically to be sure -- a "flight to quality" in US T-bills. 2) Now that the Paulson Plan 2.0 has given way to full-blown equity stakes in US super-banks -- the sort of initiative you mistakenly assume to be uniquely European -- the dollar is easing back down vis a vis other currencies. To me this signals the durability of dollar hegemony rather than its death knell, but what do I know?
DR also sez:
>Even here in the US, we still have Social Security and Medicare, the digital commons, and the videogame culture.
I say:
Would you mind explaining the "videogame culture" bit? And please do so in terms compatible with some variety of historical materialist analysis, as opposed to your usual voodoo boatload of allegories and analogies that elude me and most other listmembers. We don't cotton to faith-based denials of climate change, so why should we follow suit with your declarations of the liberatory potential of pimply techno-geekism?
By the way, when was the last time you spent considerable time soaking up everyday life in East Asian developmental states? John Gulick
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