CGE posted the following Chomsky remark:
>"...the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s is probably
>the major international event since 1945, much more significant in its implications
>than the collapse of the Soviet Union."
Gulick:
(Starting side comment: Personally, I don't think the Sino-Soviet split and Nixon's opening to China get due credit. One of the overlooked aspects of this cagey maneuver was to make the US, rather than Japan, China's escort into the capitalist world. Had the latter done the job, US hegemony would really be on the rocks now.)
I'll give you my idiosyncratic take on this Chomsky's remark (not that you asked for it).
In the later stages of the last global economic expansion, now collapsed, when the coffers of cheap manufacture- and primary commodity-exporting countries swelled up with currency reserves, and said countries' sovereign wealth funds began to imitate Anglo-American hedge funds and private equity, not a single dimestore pundit worth his salt withstood the temptation to write a buzzword-laden, pseudo-social scientific tome on "the rise of the BRICS/non-West" being the master theme of the 21st Century.
These airport bookstore novels written by bandwagon hoppers such as Friedman, Khanna, and Zakaria were effectively obsolete within a year or two of their publication. With trademark opportunism (keep your mind fixed on the big chance) they mistook the decadent, final gasps of "Bretton Woods II" -- global capitalism ruled by the pure dollar standard -- for its successor.
(See: previous thread on Dubai becoming a ghost town.)
Now, the long shake-out from the slow dissolution of Bretton Woods II, underway with the worst world slump since the global Great Depression of the 1930's, will be the "most meaningful international event since the early 1970's" and will decisively shape the key geo-economic and geo-political contours of next 40 years. So in the sense that the breakdown of Bretton Woods I was the precursor to the inauguration of Bretton Woods II, and the inauguration of Bretton Woods II was the precursor to its unraveling, Chomsky's right.
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