The Masses Rise

D

dubble-u-c

Dorkus Maximus
vimothy said:
Not at all, sir, and agreed, absolutely. However, the side-effects of China's development strategy viz. the US are a bit clearer now. And ultimately, the floating global pool of capital needs to go somewhere -- wants to go somewhere with some decent yield, in fact -- blowing up the US government would be rather futile, the CDO/RMBS tack didn't turn out so well, so it's going to have to go somewhere else... and there's definitely some people who could use it right now... Connecing savers with borrowers: that's what it's all about, right? But it's probably a non-starter (though the post does recommend totally changing IMF governance). Policy responses thus far have been pretty piecemeal: be nice to see some truly multilateral moves for a change.
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Yes. Ultimately it would be great if there were multilateral approaches to our current dilemmas. I have hope this will happen, but judging from the results of the WEF in Davos this year my hope is not grounded in reality.

I think also in speaking to the social consequences of globalization, re: the original post, there also has to be some redress of the grievances of labor.

I have no idea how this will look. I just hope our policies, (US & UK), are not guided by racist and nationalist recrimination and the lowest common denominator.
 
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
Amen to that.

There is an interesting post-Washington-Consensus-consensus (sorry) emerging in development economics, much less 'one-size-fits-all'. I'm hoping that development policy gets a bit smarter, and guess that one silver lining will be a further spur in this direction.

Dani Rodrik likes to say, "Development is working, development policy is not working. Globalisation is working, globalisation policy is not working." Sounds about right to me.
 
D

dubble-u-c

Dorkus Maximus
vimothy said:
A related thought: China is emerging as the natural lender of last resort, as the US did in the 1930s. Its not had much luck with its investments so far, and its surely nervous about the coming reappropriation of its foreign exchange reserves (though the flight to quality is preventing that, for now) -- but don't you think there is a natural role for China in the current situation?
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Absolutely. However, considering the language Russia and China were using @ the WEF. I
have a feeling we might not like the form this takes. I welcome a multipolar world where the US is not the sole arbiter of international policy though, as long as cooperation is one of the key principles - not just self interest.

There might be some positive consequences arriving soon as well. As you may already know, Wen was just in the UK and Brown stated that there will be an increase in the export trade to China.

There is some light at the end of this tunnel and it's not just the light of an oncoming train.
 
vimothy

vimothy

yurp
And it's a good time to buy British, because our currency is tanking. But that makes it a bad time to lend us any money... :eek:
 
D

dubble-u-c

Dorkus Maximus
vimothy said:
And it's a good time to buy British, because our currency is tanking. But that makes it a bad time to lend us any money... :eek:
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lol... I am sure you all will be fine. The dollar has been in the shitter for a long time and while we are not doing great, there is still quite a bit of strength in our economy.
It's a great opportunity to retool your economy towards more productive endeavors.

I might start buying records from the UK again. I suppose this might help a little bit.
 
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D

dubble-u-c

Dorkus Maximus
By productive endeavors - I mean the manufacture of goods and creative artifacts.

The same is true of the US.

I can't help but think we blew our chance to do this when the dollar was at it's low in the last decade.
 
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vimothy

vimothy

yurp
And there's upsides to services too: don't have to worry about inventories as much (and therefore business cycles); harder to export service jobs.
 
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