RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: The End Of Super Imperialism  Thu Nov 11, 2021 4:43 pm | |
| In 1972, one year after President Richard Nixon defaulted on the dollar and formally took the United States off of the gold standard for good, the financial historian and analyst Michael Hudson published “Super Imperialism,” a radical critique of the dollar-dominated world economy.
The book is overlooked by today’s economic mainstream and puts forward a variety of provocative arguments that place it outside of the orthodoxy. However, for those seeking to understand how the dollar won the money wars of the past century, the book makes for essential reading.
Hudson’s thesis comes from the left-leaning perspective — the title inspired by the German Marxist phrase “überimperialismus” — and yet thinkers of all political stripes, from progressives to libertarians, should find value in its approach and lessons.
In “Super Imperialism,” Hudson — who has updated the book twice over the past 50 years, with a third edition published just last month — traces the evolution of the world financial system, where U.S. debt displaced gold as the ultimate world reserve currency and premium collateral for financial markets.
How did the world shift from using asset money in the form of gold to balance international payments to using debt money in the form of American treasuries?
How did, as Hudson puts it, “America’s ideal of implementing laissez-faire economic institutions, political democracy, and a dismantling of formal empires and colonial systems” turn into a system where the U.S. forced other nations to pay for its wars, defaulted on its debt, and exploited developing economies?
For those seeking to answer the question of how the dollar became so dominant — even as it was intentionally devalued over and over again in the decades after World War I — then “Super Imperialism” has a fascinating, and at times, deeply troubling answer.
Drawing on extensive historical source material, Hudson argues that the change from the gold standard to what he calls the “Treasury Bill Standard” happened over several decades, straddling the post-World War I era up through the 1970s.
In short, the U.S. was able to convince other nations to save in dollars instead of in gold by guaranteeing that the dollars could be redeemed for gold. But eventually, U.S. officials rug-pulled the world, refusing to redeem billions of dollars that had been spent into the hands of foreign governments under the promise that they were as good as gold through fixed rate redemption.
This deceit allowed the U.S. government to finance an ever-expanding military-industrial complex and inefficient welfare state without having to make the traditional trade offs a country or empire would make if its deficit grew too large. Instead, since U.S. policymakers figured out a way to bake American debt into the global monetary base, it never had to pay off its debt. Counterintuitively, Hudson says, America turned its Cold War debtor status into an “unprecedented element of strength rather than weakness.”
.https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/bitcoin-replacing-us-super-imperialism |
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