On Mon, 16 Jun 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > John Gray (not the author of "Men are from Mars") thinks that the really > strange thing about the current situation is that the USA is the first > empire to be running a structural current account deficit rather than a > surplus. I rather think that I agree with him, although I have not > checked his assertion that Britain, Spain, Rome etc all exported > capital.
I thought Spain was the very model of an empire that sucked in so much gold that it deindustrialized itself. (In early modern sense of industry.) But perhaps that is the exception that proves the rule -- that when the balance goes that direction, the downhill inflection point has been passed. Michael
