Multinational Investors' Vote of Confidence in Ultra-imperialism

Check out multinational investors' major vote of confidence in ultra-imperialism today: John Willman, "Markets Cheer Bank Bail-outs" (Financial Times, 13 October 2008); Ralph Atkins, "European Banks Offer Unlimited Dollar Funding" (Financial Times, 13 October 2008); "Full Text: US Treasury Tarp Plans" (Financial Times, 13 October 2008); Louise Story and Andrew Ross Sorkin, "Morgan Agrees to Revise Terms of Mitsubishi Deal" (New York Times, 13 October 2008); "Gulf Shares Surge as UAE and Qatar Act (Financial Times, 12 October 2008); and Robin Wigglesworth and Simeon Kerr, "UAE Leads Drive to Stem Crisis" (Financial Times, 13 October 2008).

It's true that, if China, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and the United States functioned as one politically (if not legally) coherent establishment, Americans would be back in the black:

Global Balance of Payments ($bn, 2007)

SOURCE: Martin Wolf, "Asia's Revenge," Financial Times, 9 October 2008, p. 9.

That's the level at which the ruling classes have built their post-WW2 hegemony (cf. Kees van der Pijl, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class; and Gavan McCormack, Client State: Japan in the American Embrace; etc.).

Therefore, a radical shift in global class relations could come only if there were a radical shift in any one of the aforementioned countries, but these are the very ones where the Left has the least chance in the world.

Is China, though, a weak or strong link in this chain of empire (to which Latin socialists, Islamists from the Hindu Kush to the Persian Gulf to the Horn of Africa to the Niger Delta, Maoists in Nepal and India, the national security interests of Russia, etc. have provided a partial material -- if ideologically incoherent -- counterweight)?

Update

"[T]he needs of our economy require that our financial institutions not take this new capital to hoard it, but to deploy it" ("Text: Henry Paulson Remarks Tuesday," 15 October 2008).

"Investors are recognizing that the financial crisis is not the fundamental problem. It has merely amplified economic ailments that are now intensifying: vanishing paychecks, falling home prices and diminished spending. And there is no relief in sight" (Peter S. Goodman, "Markets Suffer as Investors Weigh Relentless Trouble," New York Times, 16 October 2008).

Nepal on the Brink of Modernity

Citing opinion surveys,¹ a Le Monde article claims that the question of monarchy in Nepal is far from settled, with nearly one in two Nepalis professing loyalty to the royalty, and that the conservative Congress Party, if it gets a dominant position in the elections for a Constitutional Assembly, will temporize on the matter (Frédéric Bobin, "Les Népalais aux urnes pour abolir la monarchie," 10 April 2008). While its assessment of the Congress Party is probably not far from the truth and is therefore useful, the tone of the article isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of republicanism. Coming from a good paper in France, the origin of modern republicanism, it's a little disappointing. Isn't it about time for the rest of the world to welcome the Nepalese into modernity, which has been long denied them thanks in large part to the influences of the United States and India?

1 Opinion surveys can be tricky even in rich countries, and those in very poor countries, such as Nepal where modern transportation and communication are out of reach of the majority, can be hardly reliable, as they marginalize voices of the poor and magnify those of the rich. In any case, if similar surveys had been taken in France on the eve of the French Revolution and the French had followed the survey results, France itself might have become a constitutional monarchy rather than a republic. It's a good thing that polling didn't exist back then.