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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
The World Tires of Dollar Hegemony
What explains the paradox of the dollar’s sharp rise in value against other currencies (except the Japanese yen) despite disproportionate US exposure to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? The answer does not lie in improved fundamentals for the US economy or better prospects for the dollar to retain its reserve currency role. The rise in the dollar’s…
Read more »Reality Overthrows “History's Actors”
”This is no longer the muscular and arrogant United States the world knows, the superpower that sets the rules for everyone else and that considers its way of thinking and doing business to be the only road to success… Gone are the days when the US could go into debt with abandon, without considering who would end up footing the…
Read more »Additional Thoughts on the Bailout
We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. Just as the Bush regime’s wars have been used to pour billions of dollars into the pockets of its military-security donor base, the Paulson bailout looks like a Bush regime scheme to incur $700 billion in new public debt in order to transfer the money into the coffers…
Read more »A Solution To The Financial Crisis?
Readers have been pressing for a solution to the financial crisis. But first it is necessary to understand the problem. Here is the problem as I see it. If my diagnosis is correct, the solution below might be appropriate. Let’s begin with the fact that the financial crisis is more or less worldwide. The mechanism that spread the American-made financial…
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The Bailout Will Fail
America has become a pretty discouraging place. If Ronald Reagan was still with us, I wonder if he would again refer to the United States as a city on a hill, a light unto the world. I think not. Reagan brought America back from discouragement, but it didn’t stick. Subsequent administrations erased Reagan’s accomplishments. Reagan defeated stagflation and ended the cold war,…
Read more »The Bailout Is A Fraud
In my last column I discussed the bailout as proposed and noted that the proposal cannot succeed if it impairs the US Treasury’s credit standing and/or the combination of mark-to-market and short-selling permits short-sellers to prosper by driving more financial institutions into bankruptcy. A reader’s comment and an article by Yale professors Jonathan Koppell and William Goetzmann raises the…
Read more »Can A Bailout Succeed?
Not without these elements and possibly not with them For the first time in recent memory Congress listened to the American people and blocked Paulson’s bailout of his rich buddies by US taxpayers. The same Congress that refuses the public’s demand that the Bush regime be held accountable and its gratuitous wars halted refused to hand over $700 billion to…
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