The Dollar Trap: Michael Hudson's Incisive Characterization of Our Global Economic Dilemma
Bretton Woods has not worked well for a long time, despite the best efforts of the world's bankers to pretend that it has. As the charade continues, the economy of the United States and the composition of international trade has grown increasingly artificial and unsustainable.
The dilemma facing us now is what happens when the dollar hegemony finally breaks down and falls apart? Which countries will break ranks and begin offloading their dollar reserves in size into more tangible and less arbitrary stores of value, risking the value of their remaining reserves, in a classic Prisoner's Dilemma? Be assured that this is happening quietly behind the scenes, despite some of the recent financial engineering that has caused a dollar short squeeze, primarily in Europe.
More on this later. But first, here is a major plank in our construct so very well expressed by the classical economist Michael Hudson. What we are approaching is the failure of the Bretton Woods arrangement. How this is accomplished, how it unfolds, will shape at least next several decades of history and the fortunes of our generation.
"What happens in practice is that foreign central banks recycle the dollars that
their exporters and asset sellers receive because their currencies would rise if
they failed to do this. That would price their exports out of world markets,
leading to unemployment. Foreign countries thus are in a dollar trap.
They send their savings to finance the domestic U.S. Government budget deficit
instead of helping their own domestic economics, because they have not been able
to create an alternative to the dollar."
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