Powered by America’s twin deficits, the world’s leading surplus economies (e.g. Germany, Japan and, later, China) kept churning out goods that Americans gobbled up and then sent almost 70% of the profits, in the form of capital flows, to Wall Street which, at the speed of light, turned them into cheap loans, investments and, of course, a nice ‘little’ earner for the bankers themselves. Through this prism, everything seems to make more sense: the rise of financialisation, the triumph of greed, the retreat of regulators, the domination of the anglo-celtic growth model; all these phenomena that typified the era suddenly appear as mere by-products of the massive capital flows necessary to feed the twin deficits of the United States. A combination of the failure to enforce the rule of law in relation to Trump’s illegal activities and the tendency of the law courts to uphold egregiously wrong shit is surely spelling an end to the wide-eyed, even sometimes saccharine faith in liberal institutions to work universally in the interests of a democratic population.
Author: Hannah Forsyth
Published at: 2025-04-29 22:37:03
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