thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]

Yeah I mean bonds are just savings accounts for rich people. Governments feel beholden to bond markets, and for countries like the large EU ones that don’t issue their own currency they really are, but for a country like the United States it wouldn’t really matter.

The risk of US government defaulting on its bonds is exactly zero.

That’s the only thing I want to push back here on, because the risk is definitely non-zero. There’s no like technical, structural reason why the US would ever need to default on its bonds, because obviously it controls its own currency and can just print the money it needs to pay the bonds denominated in its own currency, but if the people in power believe that they need to default on those bonds then they absolutely could. And Trump is one such guy. Take a look at this interview:

TRUMP: No, I think this – I think there are times for us to refinance. We refinance debt with longer term, because you know we owe so much money. It’s so – nobody talks about it. Nobody talks about it until the bubble pops, and the bubble could pop, and it could pop, and it could be ugly. You’ve seen it a couple of times, but you haven’t seen it as bad as it could be. As bad as it was, you haven’t seen. And I could see long-term renegotiations, where we borrow long-term at very low rates and, frankly, we do need money to rebuild the infrastructure of our country.

It’s an idea that’s been bouncing around the Trump administration for a bit, a partial default on US bonds so they can refinance at lower interest rates for uh reasons unknown idk they just like fucking around maybe?

To be fair to France, it’s not “outsourcing” because French Guiana is technically part of Metropolitan France. Like even though it’s in South America it’s just a department of France and uses the euro and is part of the EU and all that. Obviously a colonial holdover like Algeria.

This is a huge topic, with a lot of scholarship and debate within the historical academic community. So for China specifically (it’s a book about why Song dynasty China, despite having a lot of the preconditions for industrialization, didn’t industrialize), probably the best place to start is The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy by Kenneth Pomeranz. I don’t agree with all the conclusions of that monograph but it’s a great first foray into the questions and concerns of this kind of longue durée history. Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century by Giovanni Arrighi makes this argument that the Chinese state was strong enough to stop capital from taking over and that the way capitalism formed in the West is actually rather odd; this is a wonderful book but it requires quite a bit of context, and you might even be better off starting with his more broad account of the rise of capitalism called The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Time, which (despite its name) covers around 500 years from the formation of capitalism in Renaissance Italy up to the modern era. Fernand Braudel’s three part Capitalism and Civilisation, from which Arrighi draws a lot of his ideas, is phenomenal but very long and again requires even more familiarity with the historical period.

If you just want a quick summary of all the above, distilled into something quite short but still well done, I’d recommend The Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’ by Eric Mielants. It’s not specifically focused on China, but it does cover the “capitalism requires the state” bit and why capitalism happens in Western Europe and not anywhere else. For some additional counterfactual history of why the West got rich and the East didn’t, I recommend ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age by Andre Gunder Frank and Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm (this book in particular is important, since it doesn’t cover the larger question of why the West and not China, but it does push back and disprove a lot of Pomeranz’s points about coal power).

You can also check out The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood for a specific look at how the capitalism virus spread from England to the rest of the world, but she kind of disagrees with a lot of the historians above. A lot of the argument comes down to how you define capitalism and where it starts. Wood would argue that capitalism doesn’t “start” until the agrarian revolution in England, whereas historians like Arrighi and Braudel would place it a bit earlier in the merchant republics of Renaissance Italy and their financialised capital-intensive economies.

EDIT: Missed your last point, basically you need for there to be incentive to do labour saving technological advancement. Steam power already existed in Ancient Greece and Rome, it just wasn’t applied to labour saving things because there was no need. If you can accumulate power and capital via slaves and trade, labour is really cheap, and why would you bother?

Thank fucking God. At least when it comes to nukes Trump usually has the right take, glad he was able to stop this one from spiraling out of control. Not to anybody’s interests.

Don’t wanna overreact or anything but uh this seems Very Bad. Lahore is like 10 km from the Indian border and is Pakistan’s most populated city. That’s when the nukes start going.

Stay safe comrade, always appreciate seeing your comments around here.

Thank you for this analysis, love your posts here. Really interesting to watch the development of Chinese anti-air performing in this conflict.

From the Economist :

Pakistan shot down 12 drones that entered its airspace from India, warning that its neighbour would “pay dearly for this naked aggression”. Earlier Shehbaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister, vowed to “avenge each drop of blood” after India launched air strikes on Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. India was responding to an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir last month. Pakistan denies involvement.

So thus far the entire conflict has been mostly India failing in breaking Pakistan’s air defenses.