[R-P] La verdad desnuda sobre Bretton Woods y las propuestas de Sarkozy

[Néstor Gorojovsky]

[No puedo traducirlo todo. Pero es excelente, porque representa el
punto de vista del imperialismo estadounidense en toda su ruda
crudeza. Solo traduzco los párrafos finales:

"Fundamentalmente, lo que quieren hacer los europeos no es solamente
modernizar Bretton Woods, sino europeizar los mercados financieros de
EEUU. En último análisis, no es una cuestión financiera sino política.
Los franceses pretenden dar vuelta Bretton Woods: de un sistema donde
EEUU es el baluarte del sistema internacional a otro donde lo sigan
siendo, pero estén constreñidos por el sistema internacional en su
conjunto. Los europeos creen que esto será para beneficio de todos. La
posición de EEUU aún no está clara ni lo estará hasta que llegue a la
Casa Blanca el nuevo presidente.

Pero se venderá muy caro. Por un lado, desde el punto de vista
estrictamente estadounidense, "simplemente" tenemos un congelamiento
de liquidez, y el deshielo ya empezó. Las recesiones en Europa y Asia
Oriental están destinadas a durar más y ser más profundas. Así que con
toda seguridad, y más allá de quién asuma el mando en enero, EEUU
estará menos que ansioso en el reordenamiento de los procesos
internacionales. Algo mucho más importante: ningún sistema
internacional que supervise parte de las finanzas de EEUU podrá estar,
por definición, bajo control completo de EEUU; habrá más bien una
organización como la que tiene sede en Bruselas. Y no hay presidente
estadounidense que esté dispuesto a meterse alegremente en un asunto
así.

A no ser que haya algo más para comprar.

En última instancia, Bretton Woods era un intercambio donde EEUU ponía
su potencia económica a cambio de aquiescencia política y militar. La
realidad de la potencia de EEUU continúa. Entonces, la pregunta es
simple: ¿qué estarán dispuestos los europeos a poner sobre la mesa
para empezar a negociar?"


Gentileza de la lista Marxmail


On Mon, 20 Oct 2008 07:18:51 +0200 (MES), Lüko Willms wrote:

...here is an article which I received today after having
registered for "free geopolitical weekly" by Stratfor.

 "This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with
attribution to <www.stratfor.com>". So no problems with copyright. But
the article may by unavailable after some time on the Stratfor
website.


------- cut -------------------

THE UNITED STATES, EUROPE AND BRETTON WOODS II

By George Friedman and Peter Zeihan

French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. President George W. Bush met Oct.
18 to discuss the possibility of a global financial summit. The meeting ended
with an American offer to host a global summit in December modeled on the
1944 Bretton Woods system that founded the modern economic system.


The Bretton Woods framework is one of the more misunderstood
developments in human history. The conventional wisdom is that Bretton
Woods crafted the modern international economic architecture, lashing the
trading and currency systems to the gold standard to achieve global stability.
To a certain degree, that is true. But the form that Bretton Woods took in the
public mind is only a veneer. The real implications and meaning of Bretton
Woods are a different story altogether.


Conventional Wisdom: The Depression and Bretton Woods

The origin of Bretton Woods lies in the Great Depression. As economic output
dropped in the 1930s, governments worldwide adopted a swathe of
protectionist, populist policies -- import tariffs were particularly in vogue --
that enervated international trade. In order to maintain employment,
governments and firms alike encouraged ongoing production of goods even
though mutual tariff walls prevented the sale of those goods abroad. As a
result, prices for these goods dropped and deflation set in. Soon firms found
that the prices they could reasonably charge for their goods had dropped
below the costs of producing them.

The reduction in profitability led to layoffs, which reduced demand for
products in general, further reducing prices. Firms went out of business en
masse, workers in the millions lost their jobs, demand withered, and prices
followed suit. An effort designed originally to protect jobs (the tariffs)
resulted in a deep, self-reinforcing deflationary spiral, and the variety of
measures adopted to combat it -- the New Deal included -- could not seem
to right the system.

Economically, World War II was a godsend. The military effort generated
demand for goods and labor. The goods part is pretty straightforward, but the
labor issue is what really allowed the global economy to turn the corner.
Obviously, the war effort required more workers to craft goods, whether bars
of soap or aircraft carriers, but "workers" were also called upon to serve as
soldiers. The war removed tens of millions of men from the labor force,
shipping them off to -- economically speaking -- nonproductive endeavors.
Sustained demand for goods combined with labor shortages raised prices, and
as expectations for inflation rather than deflation set in, consumers became
more willing to spend their money for fear it would be worth less in the
future. The deflationary spiral was broken; supply and demand came back
into balance.

Policymakers of the time realized that the prosecution of the war had
suspended the depression, but few were confident that the war had actually
ended the conditions that made the depression possible. So in July 1944, 730
representatives from 44 different countries converged on a small ski village
in New Hampshire to cobble together a system that would prevent additional
depressions and -- were one to occur -- come up with a means of ending it
shy of depending upon a world war.

When all was said and done, the delegates agreed to a system of
exchangeable currencies and broadly open rules of trade. The system would
be based on the gold standard to prevent currency fluctuations, and a pair of
institutions -- what would become known as the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the World Bank -- would serve as guardians of the system's
financial and fiduciary particulars.

The conventional wisdom is that Bretton Woods worked for a time, but that
since the entire system was linked to gold, the limited availability of gold put
an upper limit on what the new system could handle. As postwar economic
activity expanded -- but the supply of gold did not -- that problem became
so mammoth that the United States abandoned the gold standard in 1971.
Most point to that period as the end of the Bretton Woods system. In fact, we
are still using Bretton Woods, and while nothing that has been discussed to
this point is wrong exactly, it is only part of the story.


A Deeper Understanding: World War II and Bretton Woods

Think back to July 1944. The Normandy invasion was in its first month. The
United Kingdom served as the staging ground, but with London exhausted, its
military commitment to the operation was modest. While the tide of the war
had clearly turned, there was much slogging ahead. It had become apparent
that launching the invasion of Europe -- much less sustaining it -- was
impossible without large-scale U.S. involvement. Similarly, the balance of
forces on the Eastern Front radically favored the Soviets. While the
particulars were, of course, open to debate, no one was so idealistic to think
that after suffering at Nazi hands, the Soviets were simply going to withdraw
from territory captured on their way to Berlin.

The shape of the Cold War was already beginning to unfold. Between the
United States and the Soviet Union, the rest of the modern world -- namely,
Europe -- was going to either experience Soviet occupation or become a
U.S. protectorate.

At the core of that realization were twin challenges. For the Europeans, any
hope they had of rebuilding was totally dependent upon U.S. willingness to
remain engaged. Issues of Soviet attack aside, the war had decimated Europe,
and the damage was only becoming worse with each inch of Nazi territory the
Americans or Soviets conquered. The Continental states -- and even the
United Kingdom -- were not simply economically spent and indebted but
were, to be perfectly blunt, destitute. This was not World War I, where most
of the fighting had occurred along a single series of trenches. This was
blitzkrieg and saturation bombings, which left the Continent in ruins, and there
was almost nothing left from which to rebuild. Simply avoiding mass
starvation would be a challenge, and any rebuilding effort would be utterly
dependent upon U.S. financing. The Europeans were willing to accept nearly
whatever was on offer.

For the United States, the issue was one of seizing a historic opportunity.
Historically, the United States thought of the United Kingdom and France --
with their maritime traditions -- as more of a threat to U.S. interests than the
largely land-based Soviet Union and Germany. Even World War I did not fully
dispel this concern. (Japan, for its part, was always viewed as a hostile
power.) The United States entered World War II late and the war did not occur
on U.S. soil. So -- uniquely among all the world's major powers of the day --
U.S. infrastructure and industrial capacity would emerge from the war larger
(far, far larger) than when it entered. With its traditional rivals
either already
greatly weakened or well on their way to being so, the United States had the
opportunity to set itself up as the core of the new order.

In this, the United States faced the challenges of defending against the Soviet
Union. The United States could not occupy Western Europe as it expected the
Soviets to occupy Eastern Europe; it lacked the troops and was on the wrong
side of the ocean. The United States had to have not just the participation of
the Western Europeans in holding back the Soviet tide, it needed the
Europeans to defer to American political and military demands -- and to do
so willingly. Considering the desperation and destitution of the Europeans, and
the unprecedented and unparalleled U.S. economic strength, economic carrots
were the obvious way to go.

Put another way, Bretton Woods was part of a broader American effort to
extend the wartime alliance -- sans the Soviets -- beyond Germany's
surrender. After all wars, there is the hope that alliances that have defeated
a common enemy will continue to function to administer and maintain the
peace. This happened at the Congress of Vienna and Versailles as well.
Bretton Woods was more than an attempt to shape the global economic
system, it was an effort to grow a military alliance into a broader U.S.-led
and -dominated bloc to counter the Soviets.

At Bretton Woods, the United States made itself the core of the new system,
agreeing to become the trading partner of first and last resort. The United
States would allow Europe near tariff-free access to its markets, and turn a
blind eye to Europe's own tariffs so long as they did not become too
egregious -- something that at least in part flew in the face of the Great
Depression?s lessons. The sale of European goods in the United States would
help Europe develop economically, and, in exchange, the United States would
receive deference on political and military matters: NATO -- the ultimate
hedge against Soviet invasion -- was born.

The "free world" alliance would not consist of a series of equal states.
Instead, it would consist of the United States and everyone else. The
"everyone else" included shattered European economies, their impoverished
colonies, independent successor states and so on. The truth was that Bretton
Woods was less a compact of equals than a framework for economic
relations within an unequal alliance against the Soviet Union. The foundation
of Bretton Woods was American economic power -- and the American
interest in strengthening the economies of the rest of the world to immunize
them from communism and build the containment of the Soviet Union.

Almost immediately after the war, the United States began acting in ways that
indicated that Bretton Woods was not -- for itself at least -- an economic
program. When loans to fund Western Europe's redevelopment failed to
stimulate growth, those loans became grants, aka the Marshall Plan. Shortly
thereafter, the United States -- certainly to its economic loss -- almost
absentmindedly extended the benefits of Bretton Woods to any state involved
on the American side of the Cold War, with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan
signing up as its most enthusiastic participants.

And fast-forwarding to when the world went off of the gold standard and
Bretton Woods supposedly died, gold was actually replaced by the U.S. dollar.
Far from dying, the political/military understanding that underpinned Bretton
Woods had only become more entrenched. Whereas before, the greatest
limiter was on the availability of gold, now it became -- and remains -- the
whim of the U.S. government's monetary authorities.


Toward Bretton Woods II

For many of the states that will be attending what is already being dubbed
Bretton Woods II, having this American centrality as such a key pillar of the
system is the core of the problem.

The fundamental principle of Bretton Woods was national sovereignty within a
framework of relationships, ultimately guaranteed not just by American
political power but by American economic power. Bretton Woods was not so
much a system as a reality. American economic power dwarfed the rest of
the noncommunist world, and guaranteed the stability of the international
financial system.

What the September financial crisis has shown is not that the basic financial
system has changed, but what happens when the guarantor of the financial
system itself undergoes a crisis. When the economic bubble in Japan -- the
world's second-largest economy -- burst in 1990-1991, it did not infect the
rest of the world. Neither did the East Asian crisis in 1997, nor the
ruble crisis
of 1998. A crisis in France or the United Kingdom would similarly remain a
local one. But a crisis in the U.S. economy becomes global. The fundamental
reality of Bretton Woods remains unchanged: The U.S. economy remains the
largest, and dysfunctions there affect the world. That is the reality of the
international system, and that is ultimately what the French call for a new
Bretton Woods is about.

There has been talk of a meeting at which the United States gives up its
place as the world's reserve currency and primacy of the economic system.
That is not what this meeting will be about, and certainly not what the French
are after. The use of the dollar as world reserve currency is not based on an
aggrandizing fiat, but the reality that the dollar alone has a global presence
and trust. The euro, after all, is only a decade old, and is not backed either
by sovereign taxing powers or by a central bank with vast authority. The
European Central Bank (ECB) certainly steadies the European financial
system, but it is the sovereign countries that define economic policies. As we
have seen in the recent crisis, the ECB actually lacks the authority to
regulate Europe's banks. Relying on a currency that is not in the hands of a
sovereign taxing power, but dependent on the political will of (so far) 15
countries with very different interests, does not make for a reliable reserve
currency.

The Europeans are not looking to challenge the reality of American power,
they are looking to increase the degree to which the rest of the world can
influence the dynamics of the American economy, with an eye toward limiting
the ability of the Americans to accidentally destabilize the international
financial system again. The French in particular look at the current crisis as
the result of a failure in the U.S. regulatory system.

And the Europeans certainly have a point. If fault is to be pinned, it is on the
United States for letting the problem grow and grow until it triggered a
liquidity crisis. The Bretton Woods institutions -- specifically the IMF, which
is supposed to serve the role of financial lighthouse and crisis manager --
proved irrelevant to the problems the world is currently passing through.
Indeed, all multinational institutions failed or, more precisely, have
little to do
with the financial system that was operating in 2008. The 64-year-old
Bretton Woods agreement simply didn't have anything to do with the current
reality.

Ultimately, the Europeans would like to see a shift in focus in the world of
international economic interactions from strengthening the international
trading system to controlling the international financial system. In practical
terms, they want an oversight body that can guarantee that there won't be a
repeat of the current crisis. This would involve everything from regulations
on accounting methods, to restrictions on what can and cannot be traded and
by whom (offshore financial havens and hedge funds would definitely find
their worlds circumscribed), to frameworks for global interventions. The net
effect would be to create an international bureaucracy to oversee global
financial markets.

Fundamentally, the Europeans are not simply hoping to modernize Bretton
Woods, but instead to Europeanize the American financial markets. This is
ultimately not a financial question, but a political one. The French are trying
to flip Bretton Woods from a system where the United States is the buttress
of the international system to a situation where the United States remains the
buttress but is more constrained by the broader international system. The
European view is that this will help everybody. The American position is not
yet framed and won't be until the new president is in office.

But it will be a very tough sell. For one, at its core the American problem is
"simply" a liquidity freeze and one that is already thawing. Europe's and East
Asia's recessions are bound to be deeper and longer lasting. So the United
States is sure -- no matter who takes over in January -- to be less than
keen about revamps of international processes in general. Far more
important, any international system that oversees aspects of American
finance would, by definition, not be under full American control, but under
some sort of quasi-Brussels-like organization. And no American president is
going to engage gleefully on that sort of topic.

Unless something else is on offer.

Bretton Woods was ultimately about the United States trading access to its
economic might for political and military deference. The reality of American
economic might remains. The question, then, is simple: What will the
Europeans bring to the table with which to bargain?


---------------- off ----------


  Well, I really appreciate that someone is spelling out US-american
imperialist interests in such a frank and straightforward manner.

  I guess that really does reflect what the US capitalist class is thinking, or
at least feeling. Am I right?

  And who is this George Friedman? Is that the infamous columnist of the
New York Times?


Comradely yours,
Lüko Willms
Frankfurt, Germany
--------------------------------

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Néstor Gorojovsky
El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autoría