Re: Comments on a Wallerstein article

If I may build upon Ken Richards' concerns - there are two sorts of
warfares that we are seeing nowadays. There is the conventional one
(if we presume to stretch the term 'conventional', for cluster-bombing
civilians in Iraq is a war crime), and there is the economic one. The
current US administration is apparently talking about a strong dollar,
but the evidence is anything but one. I think a good part part of the
problem stems from the 1971 removal, during the Nixon administration,
of the gold backing for the dollar. There are some ideas as to the
relationship, at the time, between what was called the 'the dollar
overhang' — which most usually was mean to be the difference between
the dollars in international circulation and the value of the gold
backing held in the well-known Fort Knox repository. The 'overhang'
was what began to grow as a result of increased US investment abroad
and military spending. It was reckoned to be, I think, an outcome of
the thinking of the 60s, and now 40 years later we are once again
faced with a curious dollar syndrome, one that has profited greatly as
country after country has relinquished national control to the regime
of internaional markets. But despite the glad hand-shaking at the
recently-concluded G8 summit, there fundamentally seems to be more
concerns than champagne about the fate of the world's post-war and
pre-eminent international currency.


Regards etc


Rahul Goswami


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____________________________
makanaka@pobox.com
phone +65 62910840 / 96640750
fax +1 775 908 1621