Friday, October 8, 2021

Michael Hudson — 3rd Edition: Super-Imperialism

The updated and expanded 3rd edition of Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire is now available.

This highly respected study of U.S. financial diplomacy explores the faults built into the core of the World Bank and the IMF at their inception. Forensic detail reveals how the world’s core economic functions were sculpted to preserve US financial hegemony. Difficult to detect at the time, these problems have since become explicit as the failure of the international economic order has become apparent; the IMF and World Bank were set up to give aid to developing countries, but instead many of the world’s poorest countries have been plunged into insurmountable debt crises.

The book became famous for detailing how the removal of the gold standard left the world’s central banks with only one alternative vehicle: to hold their international reserves in U.S. Treasury securities.

The result was a self-financing circular flow of U.S. military spending and the investment takeover of foreign economies. The larger America’s balance-of-payments deficit grew, the more dollars ended up in the hands of central banks and sovereign wealth funds. Machiavelli could not have planned it better. By participating in this circular flow, nations in effect financed their own economic and military encirclement.

Hudson’s critique of the destructive course of the international economic system provides important insights into the real motivations at the heart of these institutions – and the increasing tide of opposition that they face around the world....
Michael Hudson — On Finance, Real Estate And The Powers Of Neoliberalism
3rd Edition: Super-Imperialism
Michael Hudson | President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Guest Professor at Peking University

3 comments:

mi said...

Ties between Trump and Clinton. Did Clinton throw 2016 election?

https://jackrabbit.blog/2017/05/taken-in-fake-news-distracts-us-from-fake-election/

Please promote

Peter Pan said...

Trump didn't deliver, and yes, they're in the same club.

Throwing an election is moot when a country is run by a one party state.

Google Democrat Republican Venn Diagram.

Ahmed Fares said...

Michael Pettis calls the dollar's role as the global reserve currency an "exorbitant burden" rather than an "exorbitant privilege".

A French economist once told me that too often when policymakers think they are talking about economics they are actually talking about politics. A case in point, perhaps, is the claim first made in 1965 by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, then France’s finance minister, that the dollar’s dominance as the global reserve currency gave the United States an "exorbitant privilege."

Giscard may have thought he was discussing economic privilege, but while during the Cold War there may well have been political advantages to the use of the dollar as the dominant reserve currency, economically it held little benefits to the United States. If anything, it forced upon the United States an exorbitant cost.

According to most political commentators, there are two main privileges accruing to the United States as a function of the dollar’s reserve status. First, it allows the United States to consume and borrow beyond its means as foreigners acquire U.S. dollars. Second, because foreign governments must buy U.S. government bonds to hold as reserves, this additional source of demand for Treasury bonds lowers U.S. interest rates.

Both claims are muddled. Take the first. It may be correct to say that the role of the dollar allows Americans to consume beyond their means, but it is just as correct, and probably more so, to say that foreign accumulations of dollars force Americans to consume beyond their means.


The article continues here: An Exorbitant Burden