On Thu, 4 Jun 1998, Richard K. Moore wrote:
> You do know, I assume, that the dollar is the standard currency in
> Russia.
The dollar and the Deutsche Mark. Most of Russia's foreign debt is owed to
Germany, not the US.
> My primary objection to your whole way of framing things is the pretense
> that national economic competition is the primary operative dynamic in the
> global economy, as if the US was losing ground to the EU in some kind of
> economic dominance contest.
But we are losing dominance to the EU and East Asia. They're bigger
economic units than we are, invest more in their economies, have fairer
distributions of wealth, and have even grown faster in per capita GDP
terms than we have in the 1990s. As I've said over and over again, it's
not really a question of national systems; the EU and East Asia are
multinational entities, which just happen to be made up of a bunch of
nation-states. Secondly, if you want to quibble with the
statistics, then you'll have to explain to us all why the Commerce Dept.
is lying to us when it says the USA owes the rest of the world a trillion
bucks on our net international investment position. Is this just a
mistake? Bad accounting? A political conspiracy? Inquiring minds would
like to know.
-- Dennis