Homework Due:
- Web of Debt Chapters 26 & 27
- Wizards of Money 12: The Imperial Budget and the Mythical Lock-Box
- Chris Martensen’s The Crash Course
- Extra credit: Zeitgeist Moving Forward or Unwelcome Guests Episode 573: I Spit in the Face of the Money God (Mike Ruppert on the Collapse of the Infinite Growth Paradigm) or episode 575: From Oily Sands to Greasy Palms (Canada Pushing Tar Sands on Europe, CETA, TILMA, SPP)
Questions from Web of Debt
Chapter 26: Poppy Fields, Opium Wars, and Asian Tigers
- How did Britain acquire Hong Kong from China?
- Who was the “Benjamin Franklin of Japan” and what did Japan learn from Henry Carey? How was this information used to redistribute land from the samurai nobles?
- How did the “state-guided market system” overcome the defects of the communist system? How does this relate to the US military-industrial complex? Could we do the same to buy out our samurai class?
- Why were the “Tiger” economies of East Asia an embarrassment to the IMF free-market model? What did Washington pressure the Bank of Japan to do, and what was their rationale?
- When Tokyo tried to deflate the speculative bubble that resulted how did Wall Street react? Within months how much did the Tokyo market lose?
- What bank was involved in the currency attack on Thailand? How did Chalmers Johnson describe what followed with Indonesia and South Korea?
- What did Japan propose to defend against this? How did Mark Weisbrot describe the effect of the IMF’s fiscal austerity measures?
- If the money transferred into private hands had been distributed to those below the poverty line, how much would it have been per person? How did Michel Chuossudovsky define the twentieth century conquest of nations? What did the Asian crisis mark the end of?
- What did Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad contend about the IMF? How did he characterize the role of his country and on what did he blame the collapse of Asian currencies?
- What did Mahathir impose? How did it affect the ringgit, Malaysia’s currency? What did Joseph Stiglitz say about this?
Chapter 27: Waking the Sleeping Giant: Lincoln’s Greenback System Comes to China
- How is China a threat to US national security? How did Britain deal with this same threat? What did it result in?
- Who led the revolution that overthrew 2000 years of Chinese imperial rule? Who was he a protégé of? What were his “Three Principles of the People” based on? How did Hawaii become the base of a Chinese revolution?
- When the Chinese Republic become the People’s Republic what happened to this monetary system? Who issued the renminbi or “people’s currency?”
- How did the Western embargo affect China? To what level did their economic growth go to? Is this entirely because of low-wage labor? Why or why not?
- How does Henry C. K. Liu distinguish between national banking and central banking? When the People’s Bank of China became a central bank in 1995 did it change its function? How did Liu say it would shift?
- What other monetary policy distinguishes China? How has it avoided speculative raids?
- Describe how the story of Mr. Wu explains “the Chinese miracle.” Compare the US federal debt and the Chinese national debt.
- Discussion question: Should the banks and local governments be one and the same? Is it the primary job of a monetary system to recycle money?
- How are tax cuts apportioned in the US and China? What are the drawbacks in China? Do they have their own “unaffordable 4H – housing, healthcare, higher education and hope for retirement?”
- How would Keynes explain that inflation has stayed low even while the M2 money supply of China has increased by 18.8%? What is the ideal that Germany achieved in four years? Why does China need to export instead? Is there an alternative?
- How does China get US securities, US technology and oil while printing up its own sovereign currency? How could China or Japan inflict more damage on the US than a nuclear strike? Which is more dangerous – China or Japan buying US debt with their fiat currency or the US buying out their own debt with US fiat currency?