Michael Hudson: Finance Has Become the New Form of Warfare

Michael Hudson explains what the U.S. has been doing to the rest of the world to win the finance war in his excellent article titled “why the IMF meetings failed and the coming capital controls”. Many of us have been aware of the state of the world economy, yet it is still appalling to comprehend who is behind the U.S. Fed’s decisions and why they are doing this. While real economies are being destroyed, so much money is being made by financial speculation. One may feel that s/he can’t recognize the U.S. any more in some sense.

From Michael Hudson’s article:

What is to stop U.S. banks and their customers from creating $1 trillion, $10 trillion or even $50 trillion on their computer keyboards to buy up all the bonds and stocks in the world, along with all the land and other assets for sale, in the hope of making capital gains and pocketing the arbitrage spreads by debt leveraging at less than 1% interest cost? This is the game that is being played today.

The outflow of dollar credit into foreign markets in pursuit of this financial strategy has bid up asset prices and foreign currencies, enabling speculators to pay off their U.S. positions in cheaper dollars, keeping the currency shift as well as the arbitrage interest-rate margin for themselves.

Finance has become the new form of warfare – without the expense of military overhead and an occupation against unwilling hosts. It is a competition in credit creation to buy foreign real estate and natural resources, infrastructure, bonds and corporate stock ownership.

Who needs an army when you can obtain monetary wealth and asset appropriation simply by financial means? Victory promises to go to the economy whose banking system can create the most credit, using an army of computer keyboards to appropriate the world’s resources.

U.S. officials demonize countries suffering these dollar inflows as aggressive ‘currency manipulators’ for what Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner calls “‘Competitive nonappreciation,’ in which countries block their currencies from rising in value.” Oscar Wilde would have struggled to find a more convoluted term for other countries protecting themselves from raiders trying to force up their currencies to make enormous predatory fortunes.

U.S. officials demonize foreign countries as aggressive “currency manipulators” for keeping their currencies weak. But these countries simply are trying to protect their currencies from arbitrageurs and speculators flooding their financial markets with dollars.

Mr. Bernanke proposes to solve this problem by injecting another $1 trillion of liquidity over the coming year, on top of the $2 trillion in new Federal Reserve credit already created during 2009-10. This quantitative easing has been sent abroad, mainly to the BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China. “Recent research at the International Monetary Fund has shown conclusively that G4 monetary easing has in the past transferred itself almost completely to the emerging economies … since 1995, the stance of monetary policy in Asia has been almost entirely determined by the monetary stance of the G4 – the US, eurozone, Japan and China – led by the Fed.” According to the IMF, “equity prices in Asia and Latin America generally rise when excess liquidity is transferred from the G4 to the emerging economies.”[4]

This is what has led gold prices to surge and investors to move out of the dollar since early September, prompting other nations to protect their economies.

The problem for all countries today is that as presently structured, the global financial system rewards speculation and makes it difficult for central banks to maintain stability without recycling dollar inflows to the U.S. Government, which enjoys a near monopoly in providing the world’s central bank reserves by running budget and balance-of-payments deficits.

Such inflows do not provide capital for tangible investment. They are predatory, and cause currency fluctuation that disrupts trade patterns while creating enormous trading profits for large financial institutions and their customers. Yet most discussions treat the balance of payments and exchange rates as if they were determined purely by commodity trade and “purchasing power parity,” not by the financial flows and military spending that actually dominate the balance of payments. The reality is that today’s financial interregnum – anarchic “free” markets prior to countries hurriedly putting up their own monetary defenses – provides the arbitrage opportunity of the century. This is what bank lobbyists have been pressing for. It has little to do with the welfare of workers in their own country.

This capital outflow from the United States has indeed helped domestic banks rebuild their balance sheets, as the Fed intended. But in the process the international financial system has been victimized as collateral damage.

The problem is that the supply of dollar credit has become potentially infinite. The “dollar glut” has grown in proportion to the U.S. payments deficit. Growth in central bank reserves and sovereign-country funds has taken the form of recycling of dollar inflows into new purchases of U.S. Treasury securities – thereby making foreign central banks (and taxpayers) responsible for financing most of the U.S. federal budget deficit. The fact that this deficit is largely military in nature – for purposes that many foreign voters oppose – makes this lock-in particularly galling. So it hardly is surprising that foreign countries are seeking an alternative.

On the deepest economic plane today’s global financial breakdown is part of the price to be paid for the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury refusing to accept a prime axiom of banking: Debts that cannot be paid, won’t be. They tried to “save” the banking system from debt write-downs in 2008 by keeping the debt overhead in place while re-inflating asset prices. In the face of the repayment burden shrinking the U.S. economy, the Fed’s idea of helping the banks “earn their way out of negative equity” is to provide opportunities for predatory finance, leading to a flood of financial speculation. Economies targeted by global speculators understandably are seeking alternative arrangements. It does not look like these can be achieved via the IMF or other international forums in ways that U.S. financial strategists will willingly accept.

http://michael-hudson.com/2010/10/why-the-imf-meetings-failed/