11 Comments

I think this is a very interesting take but I take issue with one thing, France (and Germany) managed to hollow out the center of their political spectrum, not because of the US, but because they bought into the WEF's globalization concept and unlimited immigration. In fact, while the French and German governments were falling, Joe Biden remains the nominal president and continues to push policies that aer equally in line with that globalization concept.

Now, that doesn't take away from the rest of your argument, which I think is quite perceptive.

thanks and have a happy new year

Expand full comment

How do countries diversify? There’s no one else with the military power to protect them or the economy to absorb their exports. China isn’t an option. Trade with them and you lose all manufacturing. The US at least allows balance. I see this as a return to a balanced system. US policy in the Cold War and post led to beggar thy neighbor incentives which started destroying demand. The only way out is to rebalance the system. Otherwise it’s a race to a world without demand and supply everywhere you look

Expand full comment

Shift reserves from treasuries to gold (started), work on a non US dollar financial system (started), develop their own military power outside of US control (not started), try to play US and China off to gain leverage (started). Politicians and governments tend to be rational players - when incentives change, behaviour changes.

Expand full comment

«Trade with them and you lose all manufacturing. The US at least allows balance.»

It is not balance but the determined policy of USA corporates to export as many jobs as they can to low-wage vassal countries with anti-union and anti-strike policies, to "moderate" USA wages. In the past most went the PRC, until the PRC stopped being perceived as a vassal country but started being perceived as a rival as its own corporates started competing with USA ones with their own brands.

Expand full comment

The Plan - Joseph Wang

https://t.me/stoneweapon/1954

Expand full comment

The best post of the year imo. 2025 will in part start to answer your question . Will America be able to bully the world ? The currency and bond markets will answer . HNY.

Expand full comment

«the US is now creating a strong incentive for nations to counter balance US influence. Just as a smart businesses diversifies suppliers, US trade and military partners are now incentivised to diversify.»

Having experience living in some EU countries and discussed international situations with various non-US people my impression is that being a USA vassal is not a matter of "incentive" but of necessity that they suffer but quite reluctantly:

* The USA Navy have their knee on their throats as it controls all choke-points (see the CFR "War and peace studies" project in 1940 that planned that) through which essential imports of fuel and cereals travel. Nobody wants to be "sanctioned" by the USA or to have their pipelines from alternative suppliers blown up by the USA.

* The USA CIA and DOD are pretty good at "color revolutioning" and/or funding, training and arming "freedom fighter" brigades against recalcitrant governments. Nobody wants to risk being ukrainized or syrianized.

* Because of the USA policy of exporting jobs to vassal countries to "moderate" USA wages many export oriented corporates in those vassal countries are making big profits and would rather avoid losing their sales in the big USA market.

Expand full comment

«To counteract this, the US (which has always been a reluctant imperialist)»

There were tendencies as to that already in the early 19th century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812

«The proclamation said that Hull wanted to free them from the "tyranny" of Great Britain, giving them the liberty, security, and wealth that his own country enjoyed — unless they preferred "war, slavery and destruction".»

https://www.lutins.org/1812.html

«The primary goals of the War of 1812 were conquering Florida, at the time native American territory, and Canada, then British territory. Although the U.S. ostensibly went to war over maritime issues, John Randolph of Virginia noted, "Agrarian cupidity, not maritime rights, urges this war. Ever since the report of the Committee on Foreign Relations came into the House, we have heard but one eternal monotonous tone - Canada! Canada! Canada! Not a syllable about Halifax, which unquestionably should be our great object in a war for maritime security." [...] The Rev. McLeod described the war as "extending the principles of representative democracy - the blessings of liberty, and the rights of self-government - among the colonies of Europe.»

Since the Spanish war the operating logic of the USA has been unchanged:

* Wait until some kind of rival empire is weak.

* Start a proxy war against that empire or by funding internal civil war.

* Join the war and defeat and dismember the rival empire.

This happened to the spanish and chinese empires in the 19th century, then to the german, russian, ottoman empires in WW1, to the english, dutch, japanese, italian and german empires in WW2, the the soviet empire in 1991. The USA left alone the french empire because I guess of a tiny reserve of sentimentalism, and the portuguese empire because it was largely worhtless. It is now the turn of the PRC.

The differences between the earlier empires and the ballooning USA empire are mostly:

* It is a suzerain more than a colonial empire, where the USA take control of foreign, military and security matters of its protectorates and allow limited self-government domestically (as long at it follow the "Washington consensus" economic model).

* The USA governments prefers limited representative democracy in the resource-poor protectorates, as represenatives have proven to be endlessly bribable, and prefers brutal dictatorship in resource-rich protectorates so that the ruler be in constant fear of revolution and must rely on USA force to keep in power.

Expand full comment

«the “Greed is Bad” era from 1945 to 1980 (high taxes and heavily regulated), to the “Greed is Good” Era from 1980 to 2016 (lower taxes and regulation, but more competition and freer trade), to now the “Greed is Everything” (no taxes or regulation, and using government policy to maximise profits).»

I guess that TDS compels to assume that "greed is everything" started in 2016, but the dotcom boom boom of 1999 and the derivatives boom of 2007, and the obscene bailouts of both, contradict that. The inflection point which is abundantly clear in graphs about stock prices and debt is 1995, that is the Republican majority in Congress and Newt Gingrich's "Contract on America":

J. K. Galbraith, "The Great Crash 1929" (1954): “for a generation Democrats have been warning that to elect Republicans is to invite another disaster like that of 1929. The defeat of the Democratic candidate in 1952 was widely attributed to the unfortunate appearance at the polls of too many youths who knew only by hearsay of the horrors of those days. It would be good to know whether, indeed, we shall some day have another 1929.”

Arguably the first showing of the "greed is everything" ideology was the 1987 attempted bailout of the deeply corrupt ("Keating Five" etc.) S&L entities and Hyman Minsky wrote at the time:

“No matter how exalted a bank may have been, we all know that if assets were marked to market, the net worth of many of the giants of international banking would disappear. Nevertheless these banks are able to sell their liabilities in financial markets, because the buyers believe that they will be protected against losses by the central bank.”

The true start of the "greed is everything" era was perhaps, if we must choose a point in time, the full deregulation of derivatives trading pushed through very hard by Clinton, Summers and Greenspan despite the deep objections of many including the head of the OFTC and others, another quote by USA lawyer (John Rainbolt at the time Chairman, International Issues Subcommittee of the American Bar Association’s Committee on Futures and Derivatives Regulation) during a debate on deregulation in the USA in the 1990s wrote:

http://derivativesstrategy.com/magazine/archive/1997/0597rtbl.asp

“Avoid the British experience. As the professional market legislation also proposes, U.K. regulators concentrated on the politically correct goal of protecting small punters, leaving professionals to their own devices. Knowing the relevant history, a U.S. politician worth his or her salt should wonder if the Conservative government’s approach to market oversight has something to do with the number of Tory resumes on the street, and if a vote to duplicate U.K. market regulation communicates this disease, brought on by a rapid succession of Barings, Morgan Grenfell and Sumitomo problems, to name a few. British regulation, now recovering and making adjustments, failed not only to protect the public from the industry, but the industry from itself.”

Expand full comment

One only has to see who Trump is surrounding himself with, from the private sector, to see that this is the ultimate corporate takeover.

Expand full comment

Not a sudden change - it has been coming for years.

Expand full comment