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Why the troubled US empire could quickly fall apart
For the first time in more than a century, the United States has a real, serious, ascending global competitor
By RICHARD D WOLFFOCTOBER 31, 2021
Empires decline when their long habits of serving minority elites blind them to those moments when the system’s survival requires overriding those elites’ needs, at least for a while.
For the first time in more than a century, the United States has a real, serious, ascending global competitor. The British, German, Russian and Japanese systems never reached that status. The People’s Republic of China now has.
No settled US policy vis-à-vis China has proved feasible because of internal US divisions and China’s spectacular growth. Political leaders and “defense” contractors find China-bashing attractive. Denouncing China serves as popular scapegoating for many politicians in both parties and as support for an ever-increasing defense spending by the military.
asiatimes.com
Levels of debt – government, corporate and household – are all at or near historical records and rising. Feeding and thereby supporting the rising debts is the Federal Reserve, with its years of quantitative easing.
Officials at the highest levels are now discussing the possible issuance of a trillion-dollar platinum coin to have the Fed give that sum in new credit to the US Treasury to enable more government spending.
The purpose goes far beyond political squabbling over the cap on the national debt. The goal is nothing less than freeing the government to inject still more massive amounts of new money into the capitalist system to sustain it in times of unprecedented difficulty.
The US Federal Reserve has smashed all prior records of money creation. Photo: iStock
The United States has 4.25% of the world’s population yet accounts for about 20% of global deaths from Covid-19. A rich global superpower with a highly developed medical industry proved to be badly unprepared for and unable to cope with a viral pandemic.
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However, major segments of large corporate business have invested hundreds of billions in China and in global supply chains linked to China. They do not want to risk them. In addition, for decades, China has offered one of the world’s lowest-cost, better educated and trained, and most disciplined labor forces coupled with the world’s fastest-growing market for both capital and consumer goods.
Competitive US firms believe that global success requires their firms to be well established in that nation with the world’s largest population, among the world’s least costly workers, and with the world’s fastest-growing market.
Everything taught and learned in business schools supports that view. Thus the US Chamber of Commerce opposed former president Donald Trump’s trade/tariff wars and now opposes President Joe Biden’s hyped-up program of China-bashing.
For the first time in more than a century, the United States has a real, serious, ascending global competitor
By RICHARD D WOLFFOCTOBER 31, 2021
Empires decline when their long habits of serving minority elites blind them to those moments when the system’s survival requires overriding those elites’ needs, at least for a while.
For the first time in more than a century, the United States has a real, serious, ascending global competitor. The British, German, Russian and Japanese systems never reached that status. The People’s Republic of China now has.
No settled US policy vis-à-vis China has proved feasible because of internal US divisions and China’s spectacular growth. Political leaders and “defense” contractors find China-bashing attractive. Denouncing China serves as popular scapegoating for many politicians in both parties and as support for an ever-increasing defense spending by the military.
Why the troubled US empire could quickly fall apart
The US wars lost in Iraq and Afghanistan exposed imperial overreach beyond what even 20 years of war could manage. That the defeats were drawn out for so many years shows that domestic politics and…
asiatimes.com
Levels of debt – government, corporate and household – are all at or near historical records and rising. Feeding and thereby supporting the rising debts is the Federal Reserve, with its years of quantitative easing.
Officials at the highest levels are now discussing the possible issuance of a trillion-dollar platinum coin to have the Fed give that sum in new credit to the US Treasury to enable more government spending.
The purpose goes far beyond political squabbling over the cap on the national debt. The goal is nothing less than freeing the government to inject still more massive amounts of new money into the capitalist system to sustain it in times of unprecedented difficulty.
The US Federal Reserve has smashed all prior records of money creation. Photo: iStock
The United States has 4.25% of the world’s population yet accounts for about 20% of global deaths from Covid-19. A rich global superpower with a highly developed medical industry proved to be badly unprepared for and unable to cope with a viral pandemic.
===============================
However, major segments of large corporate business have invested hundreds of billions in China and in global supply chains linked to China. They do not want to risk them. In addition, for decades, China has offered one of the world’s lowest-cost, better educated and trained, and most disciplined labor forces coupled with the world’s fastest-growing market for both capital and consumer goods.
Competitive US firms believe that global success requires their firms to be well established in that nation with the world’s largest population, among the world’s least costly workers, and with the world’s fastest-growing market.
Everything taught and learned in business schools supports that view. Thus the US Chamber of Commerce opposed former president Donald Trump’s trade/tariff wars and now opposes President Joe Biden’s hyped-up program of China-bashing.
