On Sat, 1 Jun, 2019, 5:42 PM Charles Haynes, <[email protected]> wrote:
> Surely I don't have to point out that when Teddy Roosevelt was president > the USA was still on the gold standard, so his remarks are completely > irrelevant to modern currency markets. > That's irrelevant - big stick diplomacy has formed the backbone of US foreign and trade policy for a hundred years now. Teddy was at least honest about it, those were simpler times. The policy has since been euphemistically rebranded by every President, but remained largely the same. Got stick, will put the hurt. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/trump-doctrine-foreign-policy/556778/ To speak to your immediate concern, the US treasury was bankrupted by the Vietnam war, leading to the Nixon shock and the unilateral cancellation of the convertibility of the US dollar to gold. The only reason the rest of the world kept quiet even though their Dollar reserves were rendered worthless overnight was their fear of the big stick. I'd recommend the writings of Noam Chomsky but anyone who's lived through the Iraq war and seen Halliburton and Dick Cheney in action doesn't really need more convincing. Economic power is the chief prize of military power, the US like any good imperialist understands and embraces this principle. London became a financial hub, wresting the crown from Paris using much the same style of military might that allowed New York to wears the crown a century later as the capital market of the world. The reason Mitsubishi or other Japanese firms don't manufacture a competitor to the F-22/35 is because they don't want to end up like Huawei. Silicon valley wouldn't have been possible were it not for early backing from the department of defense. The US economic engine and the Dollar both rely on the country's military adventures or the threat of such adventures to keep the lights on. It's another thing entirely that the US financial markets, silicon valley, and other economic engines are the most efficient, but that's really because they've been allowed to flourish unchallenged. In cruder times the British would chop the thumbs of Indian weavers and their children so they couldn't compete with British milled cotton. After a couple of generations they'd knock Indian cotton for its inferiority to British cotton. These days it's harder to tell through all the layers of euphemism. Any attentive student of history though has watched this movie play out many times over. >
