Debt (67 page)

Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. government can’t “just print money,” because American money is not issued by the government at all, but by private banks, under the aegis of the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve—despite the name—is technically not part of the government at all, but a peculiar sort of public-private hybrid, a consortium of privately owned banks whose chairman is appointed by the United States president, with Congressional approval, but
which otherwise operates without public oversight. All dollar bills in circulation in America are “Federal Reserve Notes”—the Fed issues them as promissory notes, and commissions the U.S. mint to do the actual printing, paying it four cents for each bill.
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The arrangement is just a variation of the scheme originally pioneered by the Bank of England, whereby the Fed “loans” money to the United States government by purchasing treasury bonds, and then monetizes the U.S. debt by lending the money thus owed by the government to other banks.
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The difference is that while the Bank of England originally loaned the king gold, the Fed simply whisks the money into existence by saying that it’s there. Thus, it’s the Fed that has the power to print money.
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The banks that receive loans from the Fed are no longer permitted to print money themselves, but they are allowed to create virtual money by making loans at a fractional reserve rate established by the Fed—though in the wake of the current credit crisis, at time of this writing, there has been a move to remove even these restrictions.

All this is a bit of a simplification: monetary policy is endlessly arcane, and it does sometimes seem, intentionally so. (Henry Ford once remarked that if ordinary Americans ever found out how the banking system really worked, there would be a revolution tomorrow.) What is remarkable for present purposes is not so much that American dollars are created by banks, but that one apparently paradoxical result of Nixon’s floating the currency was that these bank-created dollars themselves replaced gold as the world’s reserve currency: that is, as the ultimate store of value in the world, yielding the United States enormous economic advantages.

Meanwhile, the U.S. debt remains, as it has been since 1790, a war debt: the United States continues to spend more on its military than do all other nations on earth put together, and military expenditures are not only the basis of the government’s industrial policy; they also take up such a huge proportion of the budget that by many estimations, were it not for them, the United States would not run a deficit at all.

The U.S. military, unlike any other, maintains a doctrine of global power projection: that it should have the ability, through roughly 800 overseas military bases, to intervene with deadly force absolutely anywhere on the planet. In a way, though, land forces are secondary; at least since World War II, the key to U.S. military doctrine has always been a reliance on air power. The United States has fought no war in which it did not control the skies, and it has relied on aerial bombardment far more systematically than any other military—in its recent occupation of Iraq, for instance, even going so far as to bomb residential neighborhoods of cities ostensibly under its own control. The essence
of U.S. military predominance in the world is, ultimately, the fact that it can, at will, drop bombs, with only a few hours’ notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet.
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No other government has ever had anything remotely like this sort of capability. In fact, a case could well be made that it is this very power that holds the entire world monetary system, organized around the dollar, together.

Because of United States trade deficits, huge numbers of dollars circulate outside the country; and one effect of Nixon’s floating of the dollar was that foreign central banks have little they can do with these dollars except to use them to buy U.S. treasury bonds.
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This is what is meant by the dollar becoming the world’s “reserve currency.” These bonds are, like all bonds, supposed to be loans that will eventually mature and be repaid, but as economist Michael Hudson, who first began observing the phenomenon in the early ’70s, noted, they never really do:

What’s more, over time, the combined effect of low interest payments and the inflation is that these bonds actually depreciate in
value—adding to the tax effect, or as I preferred to put it in the first chapter, “tribute.” Economists prefer to call it “seigniorage.” The effect, though, is that American imperial power is based on a debt that will never—can never—be repaid. Its national debt has become a promise, not just to its own people, but to the nations of the entire world, that everyone knows will not be kept.

At the same time, U.S. policy was to insist that those countries relying on U.S. treasury bonds as their reserve currency behaved in exactly the opposite way as they did: observing tight money policies and scrupulously repaying their debts.

As I’ve already observed, since Nixon’s time, the most significant overseas buyers of U.S. treasury bonds have tended to be banks in countries that were effectively under U.S. military occupation. In Europe, Nixon’s most enthusiastic ally in this respect was West Germany, which then hosted more than three hundred thousand U.S. troops. In more recent decades the focus has shifted to Asia, particularly the central banks of countries like Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea—again, all U.S. military protectorates. What’s more, the global status of the dollar is maintained in large part by the fact that it is, again since 1971, the only currency used to buy and sell petroleum, with any attempt by OPEC countries to begin trading in any currency stubbornly resisted by OPEC members Saudi Arabia and Kuwait—also U.S. military protectorates. When Saddam Hussein made the bold move of singlehandedly switching from the dollar to the euro in 2000, followed by Iran in 2001, this was quickly followed by American bombing and military occupation.
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How much Hussein’s decision to buck the dollar really weighed into the U.S. decision to depose him is impossible to know, but no country in a position to make a similar switch can ignore the possibility. The result, among policymakers particularly in the global South, is widespread terror.
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In all this, the advent of the free-floating dollar marks not a break with the alliance of warriors and financiers on which capitalism itself was originally founded, but its ultimate apotheosis. Neither has the return to virtual money led to a great return to relations of honor and trust: quite the contrary. By 1971, the change had only just begun. The American Express card, the first general-purpose credit card, had been invented a mere thirteen years before, and the modern national credit-card system had only really come into being with the advent of Visa and MasterCard in 1968. Debit cards were later, creatures of the
1970s, and the current, largely cashless economy only came into being in the 1990s. All of these new credit arrangements were mediated not by interpersonal relations of trust but by profit-seeking corporations, and one of the earliest and greatest political victories of the U.S. credit-card industry was the elimination of all legal restrictions on what they could charge as interest.

If history holds true, an age of virtual money should mean a movement away from war, empire-building, slavery, and debt peonage (waged or otherwise), and toward the creation of some sort of overarching institutions, global in scale, to protect debtors. What we have seen so far is the opposite. The new global currency is rooted in military power even more firmly than the old was. Debt peonage continues to be the main principle of recruiting labor globally: either in the literal sense, in much of East Asia or Latin America, or in the subjective sense, whereby most of those working for wages or even salaries feel that they are doing so primarily to pay off interest-bearing loans. The new transportation and communications technologies have just made it easier, making it possible to charge domestics or factory workers thousands of dollars in transportation fees, and then have them work off the debt in distant countries where they lack legal protections.
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Insofar as overarching grand cosmic institutions have been created that might be considered in any way parallel to the divine kings of the ancient Middle East or the religious authorities of the Middle Ages, they have not been created to protect debtors, but to enforce the rights of creditors. The International Monetary Fund is only the most dramatic case in point here. It stands at the pinnacle of a great, emerging global bureaucracy—the first genuinely global administrative system in human history, enshrined not only in the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, but also the endless host of economic unions and trade organizations and non-governmental organizations that work in tandem with them—created largely under U.S. patronage. All of them operate on the principle that (unless one is the United States Treasury), “one has to pay one’s debts”—since the specter of default by any country is assumed to imperil the entire world monetary system, threatening, in Addison’s colorful image, to turn all the world’s sacks of (virtual) gold into worthless sticks and paper.

All true. Still, we are speaking of a mere forty years here. But Nixon’s gambit, what Hudson calls “debt imperialism,” has already come under considerable strain. The first casualty was precisely the imperial bureaucracy dedicated to the protection of creditors (other than those that were owed money by the United States). IMF policies of insisting that debts be repaid almost exclusively from the pockets
of the poor were met by an equally global movement of social rebellion (the so-called “anti-globalization movement”—though the name is profoundly deceptive), followed by outright fiscal rebellion in both East Asia and Latin America. By 2000, East Asian countries had begun a systematic boycott of the IMF. In 2002, Argentina committed the ultimate sin: they defaulted—and got away with it. Subsequent U.S. military adventures were clearly meant to terrify and overawe, but they do not appear to have been very successful: partly because, to finance them, the United States had to turn not just to its military clients, but increasingly, to China, its chief remaining military rival. After the near-total collapse of the U.S. financial industry, which despite having been very nearly granted rights to make up money at will,
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managed to end up with trillions in liabilities it could not pay, bringing the world economy to a standstill, eliminating even the pretense that debt imperialism guaranteed stability.

Just to give a sense of how extreme a financial crisis we are talking about, here are some statistical charts culled from the pages of the St. Louis Federal Reserve web page.
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Here is the amount of U.S. debt held overseas:

Meanwhile, private U.S. banks reacted to the crash by abandoning any pretense that we are dealing with a market economy, shifting all available assets into the coffers of the Federal Reserve itself, which purchased U.S. Treasuries: