Читать книгу Capitalism’s Crises - Alfredo Saad-Filho - Страница 19

Immanuel Wallerstein (2003) has argued that the US has declined as a hegemonic power over the past 50 years. His argument tends to suggest that key defining moments – from the mass resistance of 1968, defeat in Vietnam to, more recently, the War on Terror – have contributed to the decline of the US. Although Wallerstein is alive to contingency, his argument does not take on board a crucial attempt by the US to remake the material basis of its global power, and particularly, to centre this on controlling global finance. While this has been a tenuous coefficient of power, it has increased the complexity, reach and systemic leverage that the US has over the global capitalist system. And, in this regard, Gowan’s (1999) analysis of the evolution of the Dollar-Wall Street Regime from the 1970s to the 1990s is crucial. The Dollar-Wall Street Regime has not only remade post-World War II international finance, but has also built up and articulated a complex mix of institutions, financial power, the dollar and US power. These dynamics have been further strengthened by global neoliberal restructuring, which has placed high finance at the centre of the global political economy and with free rein to do as it pleases.

This means that financialisation has ensured that the structural power of finance capital is embedded in three important ways to ensure speculation and short-term profit making. Firstly, financial structures are now part of the systemic dynamics of global accumulation. So, if banks or finance houses fail, this has ramifications on a global scale. In the 2007–2009 financial crisis, banks lost over US$140 billion through sub-prime loans, and the value of credit default swaps was estimated at US$62.2 trillion. The combination of these losses broke confidence in the financial system. Secondly, most state structures, except those that have opted out of the logic of global financialisation, manage their macro-economies to ensure that the risk to financial capital is mitigated. Macro-economic frameworks and regulatory interventions are governed by the imperatives of globalised markets (such as foreign-exchange markets, housing markets, stock exchanges, government debt and commodity markets). Therefore, the state ensures that capital’s interests are maintained. Thirdly, the frontiers of financialisation and its crisis-engendering effects span spatial boundaries – extending from households to countries, national and global economic sectors, disaster zones and even war zones.⁵

The global political economy has been driven by the process of financial overaccumulation as a systemic dimension of global capitalism, spreading financialised chaos and instability. Financialised chaos has been registered in the following events: the Latin American debt crisis of 1982; the US stock-market crash because of junk bonds (1987); the 1997 Asian crisis; Russia and Brazil (1990–1999); the bursting of the dot.com bubble because of overinflated values (2000–2001); Argentina and Turkey (2000–2002); and the global financial crisis from 2007/08 until the present, which has engulfed the entire global political economy.

Capital has responded to the crises of 2007/08 with a renewal of the conjunctural project of neoliberalisation. Financial overaccumulation has been rescued through state intervention and austerity, without jettisoning the rationalities, institutional structures or practices of neoliberalisation. Global financial markets are now more deeply integrated and driven by information technology, essentially guaranteeing financialised chaos in the global political economy. Although this historical tendency thrives on its own, it also inter-locks with other tendencies through neoliberalisation and commodification, which is evident in relation to the climate crisis, peak oil, food-system crisis and securitisation of democracy.