Like all bankrupt Empires whose corrupt elite clings to power by suppressing the threat posed by bourgeois entrepreneurialism with the aid of the dole-soaked welfare proletariat, the US needs to ensure continuous access to resources from abroad at less than the free market cost its impaired system cannot afford to pay.
Armed might is obvious means of this expropriation, though a little problematical even when dressed up as a Crusade, or as a sine qua non of the maintenance of ‘national security’, as the present Administration is discovering.
However, just as dishonest money aids the theft at home, it can also pilfer riches and drain savings from abroad, if its debased currency can be foisted upon credulous foreigners.
Thus, this campaign for a renminbi revaluation (in truth, a dollar devaluation) is highly hypocritical.
As a prime example, take the Japanese, who for years have had to suffer browbeatings by Western ‘experts’, telling them to print yet more money and to buy even more foreign (i.e. US) assets as a supposed cure for the mild ongoing price declines falsely held to be the root of the woes in their highly arthritic, totally Keynesian, political economy.
Indeed, the egregious former Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, used to boast graphically of making his counterpart in Tokyo ‘drop his trousers’ when he called upon him to undertake yet another round of such intervention.
All the US wants from China is a token gesture to appease the increasingly vocal rust-belt lobby groups in an election year: anything which might make a real difference to the vast, productivity-adjusted gap in real labour costs would be too terrible to countenance.
That done and the New Rome can go back to doing what it always does – bullying all other nations to inflate alongside it.
