The Evil Axis of Finance: The US-Japan-China Stranglehold on the Global Future - Softcover

Westra, RIchard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0932863906 ISBN 13: 9780932863904

Publisher: Clarity Press, Inc., 2012

Synopsis

Why, despite the existence of raft of potential international investment outlets, is a major share of global wealth and savings mpelled toward a United States (US) Wall Street centered casino ? Why has an increasingly gapping chasm crystallized between ever bloating global financial activities and the “real” world economy of production and trade? How is it that wealthy governments’injecting trillions of dollars into stumbling financial sectors across the globe is failing to create new decent jobs? The present volume clearly answers these questions and more as it connects the dots linking the 2008 meltdown and over a decade of dress rehearsals for it to a rigged global financial game that cemented US international dominance under conditions where the US simultaneously attained the status of world’s principal debtor economy. It traces out the complicity of Japan in the game beholden as it was to US anti-communist largesse for its meteoric post-war rise. It examines how China, the former communist Cold War nemesis, paradoxically became the next major underwriter of US debt and exporter of global deflation as is sets low wage rates for the world. The core message of the book is that if an Axis with a stranglehold on the global future exists it is not that of those pretenders the names of which are bandied about in mainstream media but that of the US, Japan and China. And the global financial game at the root of the Axis’ international power is unraveling of the very foundations of modernity.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Westra 's teaching has taken him around the world including Queen's University and Royal Military College, Canada, the International Study Centre, in East Sussex, College of The Bahamas, Nassau and Pukyong National University, South Korea. He has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Focus on the Global South/Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute, Bangkok, Thailand. Currently he is Designated Associate Professor of Political Science, Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University, Japan. His work has been published in numerous international academic journals. He has authored and edited ten books including Political Economy and Globalization, Routledge, 2009 and Confronting Global Neoliberalism: Third World Resistance and Development Strategies, Clarity Press, 2010.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In 2006-7 through the darkest days of the 2008-9 meltdown into this second decade of the 21st century, waves of financial and systemic crises have swept the world. First came trillions of dollars in emergency first aid for "victims” - Wall Street's private multinational banks and financial intermediaries, insurance companies and mortgage lenders, as well as assorted non-financial multinational corporations. Second, the blame game: Was it the fault of snoozing regulators, rating agency conflict of interest, a "shadow banking system” of derivatives traders, delusions of ivy league "quants”, Ponzi-scheming criminals, or some combination of them? Third, were surveys of spreading mass public trauma: collapse of local banks, burgeoning personal debt peonage, increasing homelessness and spiraling unemployment in the US and elsewhere. ..But, as entertaining a read as the m

Edition details

• Publisher: Clarity Press, Inc.
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0932863906
• ISBN 13: 9780932863904
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 244