Nicht neu, aber immer wieder wichtig!

verfasst von Popeye, 24.11.2002, 08:28

-->Michael Hudson (Research Professor an der Uni in Kansas City und Mitglied der ‚gang of 8'), der dem Forum bereits aus einigen hier geposteten Artikeln bekannt ist, hat - vor dem Hintergrund des drohenden Irak-Krieges - ein bereits 1972 erstmals erschienenes Buch überarbeitet, dass nun unter dem Titel ‚Super Imperialism: The Origins and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance, in der 2. Auflage bei Pluto Press, ISBN: 0745319904, erschienen ist.

Das Thema, das Hudson in diesem Buch aufgreift ist dem Forum nicht unbekannt. @R.Deutsch und andere haben schon vor langer Zeit im Forum darauf hingewiesen, dass die in US Dollar nominierten Zentralbankguthaben der Welt unter praktischen Gesichtpunkten wertlos sind, und von den USA weder bezahlt werden wollen noch bezahlt werden können.

Wer das Buch erwerben möchte, sollte die preislich günstigste Alternative unter Preisvergleich ermitteln.

Nachstehend die von Hudson geschriebene Presseveröffentlichung des Verlages:

In the 1991 Gulf War, America got its allies to bear most of the costs
voluntarily. After all, U.S. diplomats claimed, wasn't the war fought to
protect Kuwait and the next petro-domino, Saudi Arabia, from Iraqi attack -
and in the process to protect Europe's oil and gas supplies from an
aggressive grabber? Wasn't it therefore fair to ask the Kuwaitis and Saudis,
along with the Germans, British and other countries, to bear the lion's share
of the cost of the oil war?
Europe and the Near East agreed to pay, and their central banks turned
over some of the U.S. Treasury bonds they had accumulated by running year
after year of trade and payments surpluses with America. But as matters stood
it did not matter whether they wanted to finance America's wars or not. The
international financial system gave them little choice but to do so.
The Treasury-bond standard of international finance has enabled the
United States to obtain the largest free lunch in history. Whereas the
world's financial system formerly rested on gold, central bank reserves now
are held in the form of U.S. Treasury IOUs that can be run up without limit.
America has been buying up Europe, Asia and other regions with paper credit
that it has informed the world it has little intention of ever paying off.
That is the essence of today's"paper gold," and there is little Europe or
Asia can do about the situation except abandon the dollar and create their
own alternative financial system.

What makes today's Super Imperialism different from past"private enterprise"
imperialism
Michael Hudson's Super Imperialism: The Origins and Fundamentals of U.S.
World Dominance explains how forcing the dollar off gold in 1971 led to the
creation of a financial system that obliged the world's central banks to
finance the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit by using their surplus dollars
to buy U.S. Treasury bonds, whose volume now exceeds America's ability or
willingness to pay.
These payments finance the U.S. Government's domestic budget deficit as
well. The larger America's balance-of-payments deficit grows, the more
dollars end up in the hands of European, Asian and Near Eastern central
banks, and the more money they must recycle back to the United States by
buying U.S. Treasury bonds, whose interest rates have fallen steadily. Over
the past decade American savers have been net sellers of their government's
bonds, putting their own money into the stock market, corporate bonds and
real estate.
Past studies of imperialism have focused on how companies invest in other
countries to extract profits and interest. This phenomenon occurs largely via
private-sector investors and exporters, and any nation can play this game.
But today's newest form of financial imperialism occurs between the U.S.
Government and the central banks of nations running balance-of-payments
surpluses. The larger their surpluses grow, the more U.S. Treasury securities
they are obliged to buy.

How the United States makes other countries pay for its wars
Since Europe's Middle Ages and Renaissance, going to war has left nations
with heavy public debts. Two centuries ago Adam Smith gave a list of how each
new war borrowing in Britain had led to a new tax being imposed to pay its
interest charges. Belligerent nations thus became highly indebted, high-tax
and high-cost economies.
When foreign funds could not be borrowed, countries had to pay gold to
defray the costs of their military spending, or go off gold to print money
freely and see their currencies depreciate against gold. After the Napoleonic
Wars ended in 1815 and again after World War I, Britain and other countries
imposed deflationary policies lead to unemployment and trade depression until
such time as prices fell to a point where the currency achieved its prewar
gold price. Such economies were sacrificed to save creditors, from having to
suffer a loss of their capital, as measured in gold.
At first, America's war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia in the 1960s seemed
to follow this time-honored scenario. U.S. overseas military spending ended
up in the hands of foreign central banks, which cashed in their surplus
dollars for gold almost on a monthly basis from the 1965 troop buildup
onward. Germany did on a quiet scale what General de Gaulle did with great
fanfare in cashing in the dollars sent from France's former colonies in
Indo-China.
By 1971 the U.S. dollar's gold cover - legally 25 percent for Federal
Reserve currency - was nearly depleted, forcing America to withdraw from the
London Gold Pool. The dollar no longer could be redeemed for gold at $35 an
ounce. It seemed at the time that the Vietnam War had cost America its world
financial position, just as World War I had stripped Britain and the rest of
Europe of their financial leadership as a result of their Inter-Ally arms
debts to the United States.
In going off gold, however, the United States inaugurated a new of system
of international finance. It was a double standard, that is, a dollar-debt
standard whose consequences have drained hundreds of billions of dollars
worth of output and property from Europe and Asia.
This time around the Near East and Moslem world have announced their
opposition to a new U.S. oil war, while popular opinion throughout Europe
also has turned against American adventurism. At first glance it might appear
that America will have to finance its war alone.
And indeed it would, if today's global financial system were still what
it was before 1971. In that bygone era it seemed that no country ever again
could go to war without seeing its international reserves depleted and its
currency collapse, forcing its interest rates to rise and its economy to fall
into depression. Yet in all the argument over the coming U.S.-Islamic war,
Europeans have not seen that it is they themselves that will have to bear the
U.S. military costs, and to do so without limit.
What has changed is the fact that almost without anyone noticing, central
banks have been left with only one asset to hold: U.S. Treasury bonds of
dubious value.
Central banks do not buy stocks, real estate or other tangible assets.
When Saudi Arabia and Iran proposed to use their oil dollars to buy up
American companies after 1972, U.S. officials let it be known that this would
be viewed as an act of war. OPEC was told that it could raise oil prices all
it wanted, as long as it used the proceeds to buy U.S. Government bonds or
small minority positions in U.S. companies via the stock market, creating a
nice boomlet for U.S. investors to ride. This enabled Americans to pay for
oil in their own currency, not in gold or other"money of the world." Oil
exports to the United States, as well as German and Japanese autos and sales
by other countries, were bought with paper dollars that could be created ad
infinitim.
Imagine if third world countries, Europe or Asia could do this. It would
mean the end of austerity and a new era of affluence. But under today's
international financial system this option is available only to America.

America's free lunch as Europe's and Asia's expense
After World War I and during World War II, U.S. diplomats forced Britain
and other countries to pay their arms debts and other military expenditures
by selling off their gold and turning over their major companies to U.S.
investors. But this is not what American officials are willing to do today,
now that the balance-of-payments tables have turned. The world economy now
operates on a double standard that enables America to spend internationally
without limit, following whatever economic and military policies it wishes to
without facing any international constraint.
U.S. officials claim that the world's dollar glut has become the"engine"
driving the international economy. Where would Europe and Asia be, they ask,
without the U.S. import demand? Do not dollar purchases help other countries
employ labor that otherwise would stand idle?
This kind of rhetorical question fails to acknowledge the degree to which
America is importing foreign goods and pumping dollars into the world economy
without providing any quid pro quo. The important question to be asked is why
European and Asian central banks don't simply create their own domestic
credit to expand their markets. Why can't they increase their consumption and
investment levels rather than relying on the U.S. economy to buy their
consumer goods and capital goods for surplus dollars that have no better use
than to accumulate in the world's central banking system as excess reserves?
The answer is that Europe and Asia suffer from a set of economic blinders
known as the Washington Consensus. It is a cover story to perpetuate
America's free ride at global expense by pretending that the Treasury bill
standard is something other than an exploitative free ride. The idea is to
block other countries from creating their own credit, while enabling the
United States to do so at will.
Toward debtor countries American diplomats use the World Bank and IMF to
impose the Washington Consensus, demanding that debtors raise their interest
rates to raise the money to pay foreign investors. These hapless countries
dutifully impose austerity programs to keep their wages low, sell off their
public domain to pay their foreign debts, and deregulate their economy so as
to enable foreign investors to privatize local electricity, telephone
services and other national infrastructure formerly provided at subsidized
rates to help these economies grow.
Toward creditor nations America relates as the world's most Highly
Indebted Developed Country by refusing to raise its own interest rates or
permit key U.S. industries to be sold off.
Super-Imperialism explains how this dollar-debt standard came about.
Hudson's narrative begins with World War I, showing how unforgiving America
was of Europe's arms debts. Its stance was in sharp contrast to France's
forgiveness of America's own Revolutionary War debt, and also to America's
insistence today that Europe and Asia agree to finance present and future
American wars or trade deficits with unlimited lines of credit.
In particular, Super Imperialism focuses on how the United States used
Britain as its Trojan Horse within Europe. Britain acquiesced in
relinquishing its world economic power to the United States instead of trying
to go it alone after World Wars I and II. In both wars America and Britain
than confronted the rest of Europe with a fait accompli on harsh U.S. terms.
It looks as if little has changed today.
Prof. Hudson began writing Super Imperialism while serving as the
balance-of-payments economist for the Chase Manhattan Bank and Arthur
Anderson in 1964-69, and completed it in 1972 while teaching international
finance at The New School in New York. (He is now Distinguished Professor of
Economics at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.) His book was soon
translated into Spanish, Japanese, Russian and Arabic, and a new and revised
edition was republished in Japan earlier this year before being published in
Britain by Pluto Press.
This book was the first to explain how America has obliged other
countries to finance its payments deficit, including its foreign military
spending and its corporate buyouts of European and Asian companies. In
effect, America has devised a new means to tax Europe and Asia via their
central banks' obligation to accept unlimited sums of dollars. Super
Imperialism reviews how the British and Germans, the Japanese and Chinese,
and even the central banks of France and Russia are about to finance the war
in Iraq indirectly, by absorb the dollars that will be thrown off by
America's military adventurism. The burden on Europe and Asia is not felt
directly as a tax, but indirectly through their payments surpluses with the
United States.
The Treasury-bill standard enables America to import goods far beyond its
ability to export, providing the United States with a unique form of
affluence achieved by getting a free ride from Europe, Asia and other
regions. When British exporters (or the owners of companies or real estate
being sold for dollars) receive more dollars, for instance, the recipients
turn these payments over to the Bank of England for sterling. The Bank of
England in turn invests these dollars in U.S. Treasury bonds, receiving a
relatively small interest rate. There is no alternative for how to spend
these dollars now that the gold option has been closed. America has found a
way to make the rest of the world pay for its imports, and indeed pay for its
takeover of foreign companies, and most imminently to pay for its new war in
the Middle East.

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• Nicht neu, aber immer wieder wichtig! - Popeye, 24.11.2002, 08:28