This is just a fantastic overview of what is happening today
This is a great video, thanks for digging it up and posting it!
All very on point. I have one nitpick though... same one I always have: it has a macro blind spot concerning dollar colonialism. He tells us, countries saddled with astronomical foreign debt, denominated in a currency that's not theirs, have two options: they can create productive value-added industrialization and grow their way out of it over the long term, or they can inflate the value of their money away, and insinuates that the countries "choose" the latter, stealing it from their citizens instead.
Now, why in the world would they do that? It doesn't even work.
Because the international organizations, i.e. the US, are forcing them to. Countries actually DID choose the way of industrialization in the postwar decades. It was the acknowledged way to develop a country. That shifted when, in the 1970s, the world shifted to neoliberal orthodoxies. Now, with reference to "comparative advantage", the lending organizations .- the World Bank and IMF, controlled by the US, told these countries: you're really good at getting resources out of the ground cheaply (because we're forcing you to make it cheap and send death squads when people demand safety in the mines). You're not really good at making industrial products (because we're not going to give you the expertise, and we won't lend you money for it, either). Rather, we, the benevolent neoliberal institutions, will only lend you money for what you can make money with quickly: getting resources out of the ground (the death squads are on us). The side effect of this is that they'll never be able to pay off the debt, which will accrue interest and fees like an ancient student loan, will not become a competitor to the creditor countries by industrializing, and will remain in debt peonage to the IMF countries forever. So, they didn't "choose" to inflate their way out of their foreign debt. They actually didn't, their debt kept growing; this strategy doesn't even work (obviously). They were pressured to do it, because the conditions forbade them to take a real exit.
reply
or more like ~9 yrs ago :)
reply