Talk: How & Why the US Cannot Recover: Is It a Failed State? [] Center for Global Justice

Why, on top of the pandemic, is the US stuck in an economic crisis and how can it get out? Michael Hudson, a highly respected economist, will address our question. Among Hudson’s many books on economics his most famous, just recently out in a 3rd edition, is: Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire. It traces our crisis to preparations, made as World War II ended, for making the US dollar the world’s reserve currency. Its first edition in 1971, however, came out soon after Nixon took the dollar off of the gold standard. Hudson had himself earlier cautioned Nixon against risks of such a policy but Nixon took the warnings as a how-to manual. Korean and Vietnam war debts might be relieved if nations exporting goods to the US could be made to buy US Treasury bills with their US dollars instead of gold. The risk paid off. The “super” in superimperialism consisted in the fact that buying T-bills in effect gave back to the US the dollars it had paid foreign producers (e.g. China, Japan and Germany). The US then spent them to militarily occupy or encircle the producer. To top off the new global financial control, US taxpayer money built global military domination.