Re: <nettime> Adam Tooze: Politics don’t matter; market forces shape our

Well, this is a very interesting article. Up to the part "The Crash Changes Everything" it is all exceedingly familiar. But the observations about the City are fascinating and require inside knowledge. The key point is here:

In 2013, the City began marketing itself as the offshore centre for China. Again, this was driven in part by commercial logic, but also by political choice. The UK authorities, under David Cameron’s government, selfconsciously repeated the eurodollar strategy of their forebears. The City of London would provide China and its banks with a platform to globalise the yuan.

The creation of the eurodollar market in the 1950s unleashed both global industrial investment and contemporary financial capitalism. The ecological damage this caused, is alas, calculable (it is the cultural damage which is not). The suggestion this could happen again, in a different form, is momentous.

Another way of saying the same thing is that this article provides the beginnings of an answer to the puzzling question, Which capital interests, and which political figures representing those interests, could possibly have seen an advantage in Brexit? Now one can reply, Of course, it's clear: those who sought to play an intermediary role between the declining West and the rising power of Asia. For indeed, the Eurodollar market, unconstrained by any regulatory apparatus, was able to play that mediating role between a declining Europe and the rising US. Were the financiers of the City, unleashed from EU regulation, able to replay the same strategy today, the consequences could be staggering. However the final point of the article is ominous:

The eurodollar world that took shape in the 1960s mapped neatly on to the outlines of Nato. It had Washington’s assent. It was, as we say nowadays, a geo-economic bloc. The same cannot be said for Britain’s China venture.

A full connection to the global financial markets would be the equivalent of throwing gasoline on China's economic bonfire. At the very least, geopolitical embers will fly. The fire could well get out of control. We need to know much more about the dynamic that is being described in this article.

thoughtfully, BH

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