Interesting. When the history of this time is written we may see how cheap exports from China to US (and elsewhere) led to China holding US dollars which were later used for a variety of things including buying up assets everywhere and making inroads into the EU by buying Italian paper. The Walmartization of America seems to have led to a strange and unintended outcome.
arthur From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 5:26 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION Subject: [Futurework] The approaching sanity Some credence has been given to my last paragraph of yesterday piece by the news late yesterday that Italy's finance minister Tremonti appealed to China's Investment Corporation last week to buy the next wave of Italy's debt due on 15 September. The news apparently rallied Wall Street share prices last night. This oughtn't really to be a surprise. Italy's recent attempt at an austerity plan is even more likely to cause country-wide strikes and a collapse of its government than the present predicament in Greece. No-one knows the outcome of the discussions. Furthermore, there's unlikely to be any sort of public disclosure at any time. More than likely, though, the fragility of the Eurozone is now so extreme that some deep understanding will have to be reached, and China will have to make some very important decisions. From China's point of view, the Eurozone can't be allowed to collapse if it's all possible. The Eurozone is not only an important source of import goods (high grade machine tools, engineering know-how and luxury cars, etc mainly from Germany), but the Euro itself is an important currency ally against the ever-cheapening American dollar. Also, if the Eurozone collapses, and many European banks are devastated, then the effect on American banks (holding substantial European liabilities) is such that America would likely plunge instantly into a deep depression. China wouldn't want that to happen. It's one thing for America to slide slowly into recession, as it is patently doing right now, but it's quite another if America unleashes yet more quantitative easing and devalues the dollar at an even faster rate. From China's point of view, America and the Eurozone must both survive somehow for as long as possible until both accept the necessity of a world-wide stable trading currency which China has been calling for for years. Of the two problematiques, America is by far the more intransigent for psychological reasons. Just as the opinion-setters of England (politicians, civil servants and the media) experienced in the 1930s in trying to adjust to its governmental debt and the demise of the British Empire (and the necessity of constantly devaluing the pound), so America is experiencing the same today. America was probably at its peak of power in the 1960s at the time of taking on the communists in Vietnam -- and losing -- and it's been downhill all the way since then despite its still numerous military bases in many countries. Its last big episode of invading Iraq, but now having to leave the country with even more problems than it had before (with Sunni terrorism of Shias running amok and without, as yet, America getting a drop of oil from Iraq's massive undeveloped oilfields in the north), together with America's increasing humiliation in Afghanistan by the Taliban, all this eloquently demonstrates that America must now adopt a more humble role in the scheme of things just as England had to (most of its intelligentsia anyway). If America continues with its dollar-printing strategy, thus maintaining prime-mover advantage in cheapening its exports and subsequently throwing increasing inflationary strains on China and the rest of the emerging world, then it will be punished, just as England was. It won't be China that will do the punishing. It will be the whole world market through the agency of scores of central banks around the world, mainly of the emergent countries, which are now buying gold as their ultimate safe foreign exchange reserve. Since 1999, this increasing necessity has already produced as smooth an accelerating price curve as any scientist could wish to see from an experiment. The price rise is due to go vertical by this time next year. Before then, at levels of gold prices that will become approachably convenient to one country after another, governments will decide to back their currencies by the amount of gold in their central banks. And here the same prime-mover advantage will obtain. Those countries who are the earliest to do so might well suffer a brief hiatus of trade while their trading partners adjust but will very quickly benefit while the free market price of gold continues to rise. There won't be a panic crash in the gold price. There will be a more or less panic flattening out. There will be a reversion to the illogical, but yet status-driven, centuries-old obsession with gold that will once again stabilize our financial systems and prevent money inflation for good and all (just as happened in England all through the 19th century). But just a final word to those steady-staters who, like me, think that the advanced countries are already becoming locked into a particular urban-dense way of life that will last for a very long while (while some of the other countries -- but by no means all -- catch up), a non-inflationary world currency doesn't mean stultification. Man's frontal lobes are too curious for that. We will always be making discoveries and will always want to make more. There's no reason why, in a world in which the mass of everything we need by way of consumer goods will be made, freighted and sold by automated methods, we should not also gradually carry out infrastructure changes that will lead to a sustainable economic future that will be friendly to nature and the amazingly fascinating world it displays about us. Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/
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