Coming collapse of the American Empire?

[ViolentPanda]

I would think rather that China will increasingly see the US as an irrelevance. What purpose would an alliance with a fading US serve for the Chinese?

They need markets. The US need goods (their own manufacturing sector has been contracting for decades). The US is a market on a scale that the likes of a new Russian empire won't be able to provide for a long time.

 

[Nylock]

I would guess that the 'collapse of the American Empire' would be one of managed decline as internal and external factors dictate that they gradually disengage from overtly indulging in world politics due to them having enough on their plate at home. Sort of like the USSR as it fell into it's own decline post cold war.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

They need markets. The US need goods (their own manufacturing sector has been contracting for decades). The US is a market on a scale that the likes of a new Russian empire won't be able to provide for a long time.

China will increasingly become the market. It already is for various top-end luxury goods made in the West, such as supercars.

 

[butchersapron]

Stuff like this, from last year:



http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Secu...na-forced-a-confrontation-at-sea-with-US-Navy

I think you need to have a bit more than that!

 

[Lo Siento.]

where's the option for "worker uprising"?

 

[butchersapron]

China will increasingly become the market. It already is for various top-end luxury goods made in the West, such as supercars.

Where is the money coming from to construct these new markets and the various huge capital investments required?

 

[DotCommunist]

where's the option for "worker uprising"?

Pinkertons shot it

 

[butchersapron]

where's the option for "worker uprising"?

Died sometime in Virginia in the 18th century.

 

[ViolentPanda]

Sorry but you'll have to explain that one to me.

IIRC the Chinese currency (the renminbi) is currently pegged to the value of a dollar. In other words, as the value of a dollar fluctuates, so does the value of any currency pegged to it.
A free-floating renminbi would undermine the dollar for a number of reasons, probably the least of which is that Chinese currency speculators would no longer have an inbuilt reason to not speculate against the dollar.

 

[ViolentPanda]

now I'm picturing Senator McAin dressed as Randall Flagg and dubya as a burned out Trashcan Man

TBF, I find it very easy to visualise Dubya scuttling about, singing to himself sotto voce "try to set the night on fire" over and over again.

 

[Idris2002]

I think you need to have a bit more than that!

Interesting piece here, which argues that BHO's 'Pivot to Asia' is launching a general PRC stance against relying on soft power, and to start flexing its muscles in a much more assertive way:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/08/twilight-of-soft-power/

 

[ViolentPanda]

China will increasingly become the market. It already is for various top-end luxury goods made in the West, such as supercars.

For a small proportion of the population that won't increase by enough over the next 30 or so years to substitute for the loss of a US market (the same can be said of Russia).
And while China has trade relationships with African states, with Iran and with the Central Asian states, none of those other markets has the spread of (relative) wealth that the US market does, or the purchasing power, even en bloc, to provide a substitute market.

China would require taking a massive hit (trillions of dollars), if it unpegs. I'm not convinced that the economy or the socio-political situation in China are strong enough to take that hit without the sort of internal tensions that could not just cause fractures within the state, but also conflicts without, at least with immediate neighbours.

 

[Lo Siento.]

Pinkertons shot it

Died sometime in Virginia in the 18th century.

Defeatists...

 

[littlebabyjesus]

For a small proportion of the population that won't increase by enough over the next 30 or so years to substitute for the loss of a US market (the same can be said of Russia).
And while China has trade relationships with African states, with Iran and with the Central Asian states, none of those other markets has the spread of (relative) wealth that the US market does, or the purchasing power, even en bloc, to provide a substitute market.

China would require taking a massive hit (trillions of dollars), if it unpegs. I'm not convinced that the economy or the socio-political situation in China are strong enough to take that hit without the sort of internal tensions that could not just cause fractures within the state, but also conflicts without, at least with immediate neighbours.

I'll have to come back to this when I have more time. There are already internal tensions due to not unpegging - tensions are caused either way, and the distortions caused by not unpegging become greater by the year. Various sectors in the Chinese economy are hurt and held back by the pegged currency.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

theres a book by Octavia Butler called 'The Parable of the Sower' about the protracted collapse of an american society that fractures along class and racial lines as the ecology breaks down. Central governance- so long whittled away at by chest-beating indivdualists- has completely collapsed and hordes of end-of-the-world people rampage just burning and looting while isolated pockets survive in armed enclosures.

.

It'll be like this - but without the Scottish accents...

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

You forget that the Mounties always get their man.

More like this actually:

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

We're all going to buy so much stupid shit we don't need from China that no one will be able to get back into their houses. We'll be reduced to living in tents and eating out of bins. The Canadians will build a wall to keep us out.

 

[DotCommunist]

We're all going to buy so much stupid shit we don't need from China that no one will be able to get back into their houses. We'll be reduced to living in tents and eating out of bins. The Canadians will build a wall to keep us out.

hoovervilles back on the menu?


theres a fair amount of grey area migrants living like that in this country as well, so I'm not mocking. If anything I get scared about how easily I could be there. Have been before.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

hoovervilles back on the menu?


theres a fair amount of grey area migrants living like that in this country as well, so I'm not mocking. If anything I get scared about how easily I could be there. Have been before.

I can see that most of the people I know are slipping economically. I spent some of the last two years trying to get a friend without insurance treatment for cancer. (He died, I think in part because his treatment was delayed.) Another friend is jobless and near homeless. He's living in a house that a veterans group is renovating and working off the books. You hear about how much money Americans supposedly have, but it sure isn't being shared around here.

 

[TomUS]

Another Bush style neocon will become pres and launch invasions of Canadian, Venezuelan & Mexican fossile fuel regions in the name of saving christianity. The resultant counter insurgency wars will bankrupt the country.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

wars will bankrupt the country.

Too late, already there.

 

[dessiato]

Some years ago I read Niall Ferguson's Colossus: the rise and fall of the American Empire. From what I remember it was a good read and quite thought provoking. I'd recommend it.

 

[DotCommunist]

I can see that most of the people I know are slipping economically. I spent some of the last two years trying to get a friend without insurance treatment for cancer. (He died, I think in part because his treatment was delayed.) Another friend is jobless and near homeless. He's living in a house that a veterans group is renovating and working off the books. You hear about how much money Americans supposedly have, but it sure isn't being shared around here.

yeah, we aren't that good about wealth redistribution here either sis. The one thing we do have is water, because it falls from the sky all the time (sorry to hear about your man- privatised healthcare is a fucking disgrace and all the more disgraceful in a society that has the money to do a NHS without blinking at the cost)

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

yeah, we aren't that good about wealth redistribution here either sis. The one thing we do have is water, because it falls from the sky all the time (sorry to hear about your man- privatised healthcare is a fucking disgrace and all the more disgraceful in a society that has the money to do a NHS without blinking at the cost)

If someone is silly enough to claim that no one in the US dies because of a lack of insurance, tell them to fuck off. In fact, beat the shit out of them for me. The hearings for Medicaid expansion in our state just failed, despite a parade of example of people who died for lack of treatment.

 

[TomUS]

The collapse will come from another financial system crash.....like 2007-2008 but far bigger. Nothing has been put in place to prevent another such crisis. And the wall st crowd are gambling more wildly than ever. And it won't be just the US but a worldwide economic collapse.