Apologies for the delay, I was looking for the source that I had in mind. It was under Carter, not Nixon. 1979. Called the Volcker Shock.
From David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (p. 17) (emphasis added and I split the single para to improve legibility):
In October of 1979, Paul Volcker, Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank, engineered a Draconian shift in US monetary policy.
The long-standing commitment in the US to the principles of the New Deal, which meant broadly Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies with full employment as the key objective, was abandoned in favour of a policy designed to quell inflation no matter what the consequences might be for employment or, for that matter, for the economies of countries (such as Mexico and Brazil) that were highly dependent upon economic conditions and sensitive to interest rate shifts in the US.
The real rate of interest, that had often been negative during the double-digit inflationary surge of the 1970s, was rendered positive be fiat of the Federal Reserve.
The nominal rate of interest was raised overnight (the move came to be known as “the Saturday night special”) to close to 20 percent, deliberately plunging the US, and much of the rest of the world, into recession and unemployment.
This shift, it was argued, was the only way out of the grumbling crisis of stagflation that had characterized the US and much of the global economy throughout the 1970s.
Seems like we’re in a similar position today, with the US economy on the brink and it’s vassals already sacrificing themselves – including by interest rate hikes (not to the same percentage, but the return will be similar or better as people tend to have much more personal debt after forty years of neoliberalism than at the start of this era). If destroying the German and British economies don’t fix the US economy, it’ll surely sacrifice as many others as it takes to settle the US economy.
Apologies for the delay, I was looking for the source that I had in mind. It was under Carter, not Nixon. 1979. Called the Volcker Shock.
From David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: A Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (p. 17) (emphasis added and I split the single para to improve legibility):
Seems like we’re in a similar position today, with the US economy on the brink and it’s vassals already sacrificing themselves – including by interest rate hikes (not to the same percentage, but the return will be similar or better as people tend to have much more personal debt after forty years of neoliberalism than at the start of this era). If destroying the German and British economies don’t fix the US economy, it’ll surely sacrifice as many others as it takes to settle the US economy.