On Wed, Feb 5, 2025 at 06:28 AM, hari kumar wrote: > > as time goes on, the more does all the Trumpian extravaganza show, being > to settle into an older pattern. Does it not? There is a reversion back to > an "old-fashioned" imperialism here - without the more 'modernistic gloss' > it acquired in the last 30-70 years... there is definitely method in his > madness.
It could be both method and madness, born of what Micheal Hudson describes in an interesting commentary as a "desperate but futile effort to save the US Empire" by changing the rules of America’s post WW II rule-based order. Hudson sees Trump’s trade policy as a throwback to the protectionism and balance of payments crises which engulfed the world and ushered in the Great Depression. "Neither Trump nor his economic advisors understand what damage their policy is threatening to cause by radically unbalancing the balance of payments and exchange rates throughout the world, making a financial rupture inevitable”, he says. Mexico and other countries of the global south depend on remittances from immigration to the US as well as access to its deep market in order to earn the dollars necesary to service their USD-denminated debt burden. Hudson thinks widespread debt defaults, exchange rate crises, the dusruption of supply chains, and retailatory tariffs are all inevitable and will combine to collapse the global economic system which has been run by the US since WW II. https://globalsouth.co/2025/01/24/trumps-balance-of-payments-war-on-mexico-and-the-whole-world/ The question is whether Wall Street and the world’s other global financiers and manufacturers will allow this chaotic scenario to unfold. The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial a few days ago entitled "The Dumbest Trade War Fallout Begins” ( https://archive.is/VK6uJ), ( https://archive.is/VK6uJ ) and the other financial media have echoed the criticism of what is considered Trump's destabilizing pronouncements and outdated and dangerous mercantilism. There is also a tendency not to treat Trump’s musing about annexing Panama, Greenland, Canada, and Gaza too seriously. However, as you would expect, the international bourgeoisie is fully supportive of the administration’s moves towards further deregulation, privatization, and spending cuts on social programs which are not a reversion to the past but core components of modern neoliberalism. So we’re not alone in trying to divine the direction of US international policy under Trump. Many contradictions still to play out and much uncertainty all round, including at the top, among those much closer to the centres of power than we are. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#35004): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/35004 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/111004769/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
