Hello travelers, One of the aspects of Michael Hudson that I admire, in addition to his incisiveness, is his ability to lay-out a panoramic view of macro and meso-economics (meso referring to middle level institutional economics). This is a good introduction to his wall to wall analysis. as we go, Tadit Anderson

Paper delivered at the Boeckler Foundation meetings, Berlin, October 29, 2011, #D3.

http://michael-hudson.com/2011/10/trade-theory-financialized/

Summary

Hello there, People interested in world economics and political influence, ignoring or vilifying the People's Republic of China has been to the clear disadvantage in the current era of diseducation and the might-makes-right meme. I've said it before the western elites seem to lack much insight into how their own economic model operates, other than how it is an institutionalization of usury that serves the 1 % or more the the .001 %.

"We live in the only industrialized country that denies medical care to millions of its people and the only country that controls an impoverished minority population by imprisoning millions of its young males and employing millions of its otherwise unemployed rural population to guard them."

Hello Readers, Marshall has a point, and then he is a bit oblique about it. The Political union aspect of a EMU/EU, is exactly correct to the extent that the EMU process did not overwhelm the potential for real sovereign economic development. It really seems like a death roll grasp on a dysfunctional economic model, which is consistent as an ideology, and not as much else, Germany's that is. I have to wonder about China in all of this, in large part to understand economic principles, which seems to be deeply Chinese as well as deeply functional.

The uprisings in the Middle East, the unrest that is tearing apart nations such as the Ivory Coast, the bubbling discontent in Greece, Ireland and Britain and the labor disputes in states such as Wisconsin and Ohio presage the collapse of globalization. They presage a world where vital resources, including food and water, jobs and security, are becoming scarcer and harder to obtain. They presage growing misery for hundreds of millions of people who find themselves trapped in failed states, suffering escalating violence and crippling poverty.

Once again, the job numbers are dismal. In January, the U.S. economy created just 36,000 domestic jobs, far below the roughly 145,000 that economists had forecast. The unemployment rate fell, to 9 percent, but only because more and more discouraged workers are giving up and leaving the workforce.

Readers, re-establishing economic sovereignty is a necessary, but likely to be a difficult political task under the current corporate capture of the US political process. Compared to the US, China is a shining example of how to advance the sustainability and sovereignty of a nation. Sirota state the situation fairly clearly. Black's recent article just below highlights the failed nature of the entire dominant economic philosophy. The fine point by Black and effectively seconded by Sirota is that the economic philosophy was never really intended to serve the interests of the general public.

I will comment more on this later. These issues need to be followed more closely, as the western imperial financializied regimes sink beneath a now passed dominance.

The seemingly imminent and inexorable rise of the renminbi as a major, even dominant, reserve and trading currency, has been almost as widely heralded as the equivalent rise of the Japanese yen just twenty years ago. Even my normally skeptical friend Nouriel Roubini seems to think so. Here is an article from last year’s Telegraph:

Readers, Amin is precise here. For a moment let's imagine that the Bretton Woods agreement back in 1947 was actually a version of what the European Monetary Union supposes to be now. The primary difference is that the US at one point seemed to be more stable economically after World War II. As the largest consumer it was in a strong position to serve that function, and it might have held that position for much longer if it had not been de-industrialized in favor of the development of other nations.

This is the first article in a series.

In the economics of development, there is an iron-clad rule that "income is all". The rule states that the effectiveness of developmental policies, programs and measures should be gauged by their effect on raising the wage income of workers; and that a low-wage economy is an underdeveloped economy because it keeps aggregate consumer demand below its optimum level, thus causing overcapacity in the economy that needs to be absorbed by exports.