Re: [A-List] Do euro cracks fulfil doom prophecy?

[Andre Gunder Frank <franka@xxxxxxx>]

footnote to Gibbon: he did not trouble to ask WHY - or even how- Attila
arrived at the gates. Whatever the reasons, and i dont want to go into
them here & now, it was because Rome, the Huns''barbarians'', and all of
Afro-Eurasia were sitting in the SAME boat. Cicero/Plinyi and Co
complained about the Roman balance of trade defict with the East-
ultimately China - which not coincidentally still persists 2,000 years
later today, and Fredrick Teggart desmonstrated in 1939 in his ROME AND
CHINA : correlation [actuallyt he showed CAUSation] of historical events
that and how political events and policy in Han China had immediate
political/economic consequences in Rome. If so then, then not now?
No Europe is an Island [Donne].Noiether is the USA.

gunder
.  On Mon, 4 Feb 2002 bantam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2002 12:31:16 +0000
> From: bantam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Reply-To: a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> To: a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [A-List] Do euro cracks fulfil doom prophecy?
>
> > Familiarity with the decline of the
> > Roman empire did not help when coming to terms with the decline (we
> > always
> > called it 'relative decline') of British industry.
>
> I'm with Fry, and I don't think this too-clever-by-half hack has read
> Gibbon at all.  'The injuries of time' have afflicted British industry,
> beyond the 'public care of government', because it has had governments
> for 13 years who subscribe to the ridiculous view that economic
> development occurs by way of sectoral succession.  It doesn't.  Cool
> Brittania needs its industry both to cause developments in services and
> to benefit from those services.  As 'industry' dies, so must the rising
> sun sectors stall and recede.  'The hostile attacks of the barbarians'
> put Britain at the US's mercy at Bretton Woods and obliged Britain to
> evacuate her empire.  'The edifices of [Britain] might be considered as
> a vast and various mine' to those who would 'use and abuse materials' to
> melt down productive potential into once-only ingots, the fate of which
> was to be squandered by rapacious privatisers, maintenance-phobic
> shareholder-value-obsessed managerialists, mendacious technoboosters and
> coke-twisted cultural visionaries.  Oh, and Gibbons' fourth 'cause of
> decay' was the hostility between the imperialists themselves ...
>
> If only I had the time, I reckon I could make something of a convincing
> essay on it.
>
> > Though a quintessentially cultured European (he was born in Berlin of
> > parents from Bohemia) Fry was apparently worried about the
> > sustainability
> > of the single currency, believing, according to one obituarist, that
> > the
> > experiment 'can only be doomed'. He was particularly anxious about the
> >
> > strains a fixed exchange-rate system would put on such widely
> > differing
> > economies.
>
> Fry had an eye for the contradictions that ever confound the scientistic
> functionalist integrationists (ie neoliberal globalists).  Two abstract
> thoughts (you can insert whatever material variable you like - interest
> rates, currency values, environmental regulation, costs of living etc -
> and imagine  the butterfly openining  its wings: (1)  A given
> 'independent variable' interacts differently with different cultural,
> social, physical, economic and financial environments, occasioning new
> and unpredictable environments in new and unpredictable mutually
> determining relations; (2)  capital needs variance over space more than
> it needs standardisation (that it fundamentally needs the latter just
> shows us how fundamentally contradicted a mode of social organisation it
> is).
>
> > 'excessive deficits procedure'.
>
> 'excessive' - a word the definition of which shall ever be open to
> interpretation, but not to discussion among those whose being is such as
> to render their consciousness superfluous - those for whom the deficits
> are incomes and alleviations ...
>
> > the austere fiscal and monetary policies pursued in the run-up to
> > economic and monetary union
> > in 1999 and since. The successful working of the eurozone will require
> > much more imaginative
> > use of fiscal policy, as well as a degree of regional assistance
>
> Glib stuff, but pointed.  Keegan tells us  the absorption of East
> Germany is the traumatic and economy-retarding work of two decades, so
> he is as much as telling us that the New Europe faces an eerily similar
> challenge just as a synchronised accumulation crisis stalks the world.
>
> > The ECB is concerned solely with price stability, and flirts
> > constantly with
> > deflation. It is little short of pathetic that the eurozone is waiting
> > for
> > Fed chairman Alan Greenspan to give a lead and arrange for some decent
> >
> > European economic growth.
>
> Dropping interest rates didn't work in Japan and it's not working in the
> US.  If there's no profit in the projections (and the projections can't
> be trusted), there'll be no great incentive to invest, no matter how
> cheap the funds.  And anyway, what central banker would have the guts to
> risk the buying power of a currency still very much on probation in so
> demonstrably flammable a convocation of nations?
>
> > My goodness, it is going to be an interesting 18 months!
>
> So's Gibbons' epilogue ...
>
> Cheers,
> Rob.
>
>
>
>




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                    ANDRE  GUNDER  FRANK
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