I can’t read the article but Michael Hudson said something about a similar situation re: China recently. There’s a concern that as the second largest holder of US debt, the US could ruin China by refusing to honour them. Hudson said there’s no chance of that happening. China’s been trying to cancel third world debt for a long time but the US prevents it. If the US reneged, China would support the wiping of all international/national debt. The incentive for anyone honouring US loans would fall apart and the US – I’m embellishing a little here – wouldn’t last the week.
It’s even trickier with bank accounts, etc, because if we start to say it’s okay to seize ‘immoral’ assets, the billionaire class won’t last the week.
I strongly encourage the US to renege on its debts to China and for NATO to say, ‘To hell with the consequences, we are going to steal those Russian assets!’
Yeah, this would open a can of worms that US absolutely wouldn’t want to open.
the US could ruin China by refusing to honour them
Then why haven’t it already? There’s no better time than now
It’s even trickier with bank accounts, etc, because if we start to say it’s okay to seize ‘immoral’ assets, the billionaire class won’t last the week
Are you sure? Capitalist media has been extremely good at cultivating double standards. Yankee billionaires will simply be labeled exempt
This is unironically how the US would become completely isolated from the world. That doesn’t mean a dipshit won’t try it (look at… the entire history of the US), but if it was attempted (don’t believe it can be successful but whatever) the EU and all the allies of convenience/forced allies might not say a whole lot, but they’re absolutely never going to take loans from the US or loan money or basically deal with the US at all.
This reason this basically won’t happen, and if/when it does, is because the entire made up economy of the real world is built on this premise of the rich get richer. The capitalist class is above everyone else. Nations are irrelevant and only used to divide and rile up hogs and libs using racism and other stupidity. It all continues along precisely because no one is stupid enough to fuck with the unfuckable thing.
One point I’ll lightly concede with the “no one is stupid enough (yet)” is the recent debt ceiling shit. I expected to see and hear vocal condemnation from the capital class via the media basically saying to murder the super-hogs behind that whole thing since undermining the US ability to pay debts it owes fundamentally strikes at the whole bullshit “economy” the capitalists have set up. Maybe they knew it wasn’t worth fearing enough to go that hard yet, I dunno, but it was interesting to see something like that not get shut the fuck down immediately.
Interesting that you should bring that up. The Hudson article I mentioned was an interview about the US debt ceiling: https://michael-hudson.com/2023/06/buying-us-debt-subsidizes-imperialism/
Damn it is hard to keep remembering how deplorable the yanks are. Every time I try to attribute some reason to them, I have to be reminded that they will happily sink to any depth of depravity.
Remember when we did this to Afghanistan after the “withdrawal” and it’s now causing a famine there and nobody talks about it? Fun times
Also, ironically, the first actual example of a famine being engineered by an imperialist despot named Joe
