Was trying to make sense of this with a friend, but none of us has any theory to work from and just ended up making wild guesses.

Anybody know about this and willing to condense and/or link theory?

  • knfrmity
    13·
    2 years ago

    It has a lot to do with Balance of Payments between the Eurozone and the US. Put simply, and hopefully not incorrectly, Europe currently needs to or wants to buy a lot more things from the US than usual, but doesn’t have in-demand things to sell to the US in return. Therefore the price of the euro vs the dollar has to decrease (US has too many euros it needs to get rid of/too many euros are trying to buy too few dollars on foreign exchange: price goes down).

    Michael Hudson, the economist who developed the theory of Super Imperialism, wrote about the strong possibility of the euro losing value versus the dollar way back at the beginning of April.

    https://michael-hudson.com/2022/04/the-dollar-devours-the-euro/

      • knfrmity
        4·
        2 years ago

        I hadn’t seen that Breakthrough News video yet, I’ll take some time to watch that. I think the Greek experience in relation to the Euro and EU project is really important, especially in this political moment.

        The purpose of the manufactured Ukraine crisis is definitely to force countries to choose if they’re in the US sphere if influence or not. The US will remain top dog or it will bring down everything it can as it falls.

      • knfrmity
        1·
        2 years ago

        I don’t think so, not in my reading of the preceding concepts. Kautsky coined the term Überimperialismus, which was loosely but not entirely correctly translated to super imperialism. Translation aside, he was getting at a different concept all together, the idea that the biggest imperialist powers could form a sort of cartel to prevent wars. Lenin obviously took issue with this, and Hudson argued against the idea many years later as well.

        When Kautsky wrote about Überimperialismus in 1914 it was also too early, the conditions for what we can call super imperialism today didn’t begin to exist until America joined the war at the absolute earliest, and didn’t solidify until 1945. Other theorists of the time such as Lenin didn’t see it coming either, and in a lot of ways they really couldn’t have.

        It appears it was Gerhart von Schulze-Gaevernitz who initially came up with the concept of monetary super imperialism. He called it Uberimperialismus as well, but his concept of the thing lines up far more with what we observe to this day. I referred to Hudson as he’s the theorist/economist who has developed the theory for its modern conditions the most and appears to have contributed most to the concept.

    • aworldtowin@lemmy.ml
      3·
      2 years ago

      Hi, I’m very very uneducated in economics and I’m wondering how raising interest rates strengthens a currency? Wouldn’t lower interest rates let people do more and boost the economy? The narrative I’ve read is that printing a bunch of money caused inflation but again I know nothing about economics or how printing money relates to interest rates. So we couldn’t have a zero interest rate system in a capitalist economy if low interest rates are bad? Sorry for the super newbie questions