Currency wars: Another phase in the capitalist breakdown

[Joanne98]

9 October 2010
The semi-annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank which convenes in Washington today is marked by the most serious breakdown in global economic relations since the trade wars and competitive devaluations that characterised the Great Depression of the 1930s.


As their economies continue to stagnate and the risks of further global financial turbulence increase, the major powers, spearheaded by the United States, are waging an increasingly open economic war against China, demanding that its currency, the renminbi (the yuan) rise significantly.


The ever-worsening global economic situation and the descent into the kind of conflicts not seen since the 1930s underscores the fact the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 did not set off a conjunctural downturn, from which there would be a “recovery”, but was the start of a breakdown of the entire economic framework set in place after World War II.


One fact alone points to the extent and depth of this process: the calls by so-called liberal economic commentators for trade and currency war measures. In the wake of the Great Depression, the Smoot-Hawley Act, passed by the US Congress in June 1930 to impose a series of tariff barriers, was anathema in liberal economic circles. It was regarded as one of the principal causes of the downward spiral in world trade from 1929 to 1932 and the division of the world into antagonistic trading blocs, leading eventually to world war.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/oct2010/pers-o09.shtml

[Turbineguy]

1. So... it turns out that Reaganomics

wasn't much of an improvement over communism.