JakeS:

The transnats who plan ahead will attempt to capture tangible assets, rather than leave their fortunes in paper money, because when the music stops, the value of paper money will be a matter of political negotiation.

If the music really stops, then even the ownership of tangible assets will be a matter of political negotiations. As Chris likes to point out, property is a relationship, not an object. It ceases to be yours the moment force is no longer applied on your behalf to maintain exclusive rights. For this reason, if I where the Chinese lending money to the US, I would not be all too comfortable owning physical assets in the US either.

What the Chinese are gaining is not having a political melt-down and chaos. And, of course, a massive industrial machine with a massive resource hunger and a massive destruction of the viability of their own sustainable biocapacity.

They are in a race, and whether they end up as winners in some sense depends on how effectively they manage the demographic transition. However, they are doing just about everything they can do, with all of the choices facing them involving hard trade-offs and genuine uncertainty how much bad to accept for how much good on either side of the choice ...

... and, sure, it could all come unraveled.

However, they might keep on juggling plates without too many crashing down and without falling off the high wire that they are driving their unicycle across. Its not a static question of where they have arrived, its a dynamic question of whether they can keep the plates on the air and the unicycle wheel on the wire.

There is, however, a possible viable future, with their current demographic track meaning a falling population level by the next generation, and their real economy at least gaining the ability to make things that countries with the resources they need may be interested in having.

For transnationals looking to maintain and buid on their present position of strength, it does depend on how effectively they acquire effective military force, doesn't it? Because when it comes down to it, when there is a dispute over property titles across large number of borders, the ability to move a squad of soldiers into the property and boot out the interlopers, from the perspective of that side of the negotiating table, is the strong hand when it comes to property rights.

This is, of course, another reason for those of us with a commitment to liberal democracy to invest in resilient local economies in sub-Saharan Africa. The big transitional World Wars tend to get started in a region of soft states on the periphery of the main actors ... Italy in the Napoleonic World War, the Balkans in WWI, eastern Europe and Southeast Asia in WWII (the long cycle people have more examples, those are the ones that come to mind). The EU already has multiple stakeholdings in Sub-Saharan Africa, the US is heavily dependent on Africa oil, and the Chinese, of course, are busily building up their influence, swapping manufactured goods on easy credit terms for access to raw materials.


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.