Adam Ash

Your daily entertainment scout. Whatever is happening out there, you'll find the best writing about it in here.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Is our economy totally fucking fucked?

Got this stuff off some Marxist site, and it's scary as hell. Please, anybody know of a capitalist article or book that rebuts this?

1. "Incredible as it may sound, ever since the late 1950s, the world economy has been tossing around a hot potato of an ever-increasing mass of 'nomad dollars' (dollars held outside U.S.)  whose conversion into tangible wealth would plunge the world into a deflationary crash. That mass of dollars, now grown to gargantuan proportions - 1958's $30 billion is $11 trillion today - will be deflated, one way or another."

2. "Even now, few people are aware of the extent to which this 'technical' question of 'economics' (in reality a profoundly social question) has in fact cadenced 45 years of world history, erupting into view in key years such as 1968 (dollar convertibility crisis), 1973 (end of Bretton Woods System), 1979 (runaway global inflation, gold at $850 an ounce) 1990 (Japanese deflation) or 1997-98 (Asia crisis, Russian default, 'hedge fund' crisis). Today we're at another turning point."

2. "The U.S. must stop running $600 billion in annual balance-of-payments deficits, drawing in 80% of the world’s savings to finance them. It must deflate the outstanding $33 trillion of Federal, state, municipal, corporate and personal debt (3 times the dubious 'GDP' figure) that has kept the economy going for decades. This will entail a collapse of the huge mortgage bubble and the bankruptcy of untold millions of families. The U.S. must figure out a way to balance imports and exports, which, given the vast hollowing out of U.S. industry over the past 35 years, will entail a vast reduction of imports, and stringent austerity for working people."

3. "No less a figure than Warren Buffett has been saying for years that America’s highly paid army of 'financial engineers', media CEOs, lawyers, and HMO bureaucrats is 'kicking society in the shins'.

4. "Who can seriously imagine a mainstream politician saying 'we must accept a major devaluation of our currency; recognize our status as the world’s largest debtor nation; accept a further major fall in our living standards on top of the 20% fall since 1973; cut social services to the bone, and bring exports into surplus over imports to repay our huge debt'?"

Just heard Robert Reich on NPR say we're in hock mainly to China, which is why Europe is sucking up to them, because Europe needs China to keep us from being flushed down the toilet, where they would follow. Seems like the rest of the world would be double-fucked if we got f-ed, so we're less f-ed than we should be f-ed in the totality of economic f-uppedness.

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