Hudson on Financing the Empire
Michael Hudson’s Counterpunch article on how the USA’s global economic hegemony functions, and how it relates to the current international economic climate, is worth reading.
It illuminates how the world’s financial workings are dominated by the US, something absent from most of the coverage of ecnomic issues I’ve seen recently. Essentially, having the dollar be the world’s primary currency, and particularly the world’s reserve currency (because the dollar is the oil currency), gives the United States a number of huge advantages over every other nation in the system.
It also prompts one to ask why, if the US has these advantages, is the US economy so bad? The answer to this is another question: whose economy? The economy is bad for a lot of everyday people, but they’re not who the economy is set up to benefit. This is quite clear from the way in which the current crisis is being handled by continuing the massive transfer of wealth from the populace to the bankers. Another take on this aspect of the crisis, not dealing so much with the international situation, is Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article.