By the way, I live in Australia and always have.

The old order which is talked about in conspiracy circles is the Anglo-American-Dutch empire which has extended it’s tentacles around the world financially. This was to subjugate Eurasia as a move for full spectrum dominance. Just this week China, Russia, Japan, France and the Gulf Arab states have come out for the first time and drawn a line in the sand.

The possible conspiracy about the deliberate collapses of the economy and society in America is getting overtly evasive in all manners. If this is true, then this is going to affect to world on a large scale since we have to uncouple from the US dollar and not all people will be able to successfully get out of investments in finance or assets based in US dollars. Economist like Steve Kline and others may be wise to factor such things into their economic formulas.

“My point is that unless you have access to classified information you cannot say whether the “Round Table” theory is true or not. I have no access to that information and I doubt whether you have access to hard evidence. But what if the actual conspiracy theory has been invented by, say CIA, to mask something much more sinister?”

I was not mentioning the Round Table directory. I was giving an example of how such conspiracy can happen without people fully knowing. I do have information of particular things and the CIA is masking something much more sinister.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKP7rn186kY

“The much more sinister truth is that we live in the crumbling global order run by certain oligarchies especially from the US – and we can see it without even resorting to conspiracy theories because everything is clearly visible if we want to see it.”

Please understand this. I have to go via a lot of many worthless conspiracy theories to get to the information that personally relates to me and the person I care for. By doing so, I have learned or seen things that only a few people have seen or heard.

“Can the US be any different? You may think that the rules of the game have changed because of the globalization and progress. I have serious doubts in it.”

I don’t mind globalization. I see it as a way to address fundamental imbalances in the world. One example is between the First World and the Third world. I object to Globalization being used as a means to transfer wealth to the riches 1% of the world via monopolies. This allows for barriers to entry into the market place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barriers_to_entry

The New World Order can be perceived in two ways.

1. A New World Order that is a continuation of the Old World Order (North America and Western Europe Empire).

2. An adaptation (not understanding the meaning of the original term) of the term New World Order which is a shifting of the Geo-political balance from West to East.

Apart from China, Russia and etc. directly attacking the dominance of America and Britain financially, they have used Robert Fisk and his use of the New World Order (mentioning an international cabal) to attack America and Britain indirectly by the use of false propaganda. This could see this as an attempt by this group to alert the American public to their domestic problems. A revolution in America can bring on a Renaissance which can help save the value of investment based in US dollars. I did not mention anything about 9/11 directly (this was you). I mentioned that it is Robert Fisk that has talked about it among many other things that is attacking the American and British establishments.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fisk

If Robert Fisk was the person chosen by the Shanghai corporation to write a rumor, they world be very aware of what he has already been written about.

You can think whatever you choose but regardless of if conspiracy theories are true or not but the reality is that people are protesting and showing great distrust of all governments.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9AInYdbV7E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrhG-CI-0fY

None of this is covered by the Australian mainstream media. This is a fact that you can not deny. If you wish to debate conspiracy, please do it on YouTube or another forum. I am only attempting to make relevant points regarding the economy or things that affect economies like corrupt Politician or other elites. I am not commenting here to get sucked into debates with people that are closed to alternative views.

“The title bothers me. Why does the A in MAX? look like the eiffel tower… a masonic relic… all paranoya aside… FUCK MICHAEL MOORE!”

May be you can shed some light on this.

Just my own thoughts.

The Chinese Govt in the late 1970′s was obviously held hostage by her wishes to appease contributors who were providing “foreign capitals”, mainly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and Singapore. These regions I think were known as the “Four Tigers” – so called probably because of their crooked and menacing attitude towards commercial competition.

The old “capitalist roaders”, who came back to power after spending more than a decade either in the economic backwaters of China or under virtual house arrests, could not wait to see the results from these foreign investments. Workers were locked inside the foreigner-funded factories 24/7 and would only see daylight if they survived fires that burnt down the doors. There were thousands of news reports on factories, market fires, supermarkets fires, nightclub fires, together with factory collapses, building collapses, railway station collapses and bridge collapses, one would simply lose count of the number of major events, let alone the bodies. Through this period of Foreign Capital Appeasement, not much attention was devoted to environmental legislations, workers’ compo etc things that we are accustomed to.

Since fierce commercial competition has certainly devalued everything thing in its warpath, one may think that it has also exerted the same influence on the RMB.

My point is that unless you have access to classified information you cannot say whether the “Round Table” theory is true or not. I have no access to that information and I doubt whether you have access to hard evidence. But what if the actual conspiracy theory has been invented by, say CIA, to mask something much more sinister?

If we are in the world of conspiracies I cannot even reject a possibility that 10% of members of this blog work for secret services. What if I work for Russian FSB and you work for CIA and somebody else works for the Chinese secret service? (Seriously speaking I think that at least one blog member behaves like a CIA operative but this doesn’t matter much to me as long as I do not end up in Guanatanamo Bay).

Planting too many conspiracy theories would only mean that normal people should not trust what we have written as normal ordinary people do not trust stories about UFO, Round Tables and any other stuff like that. This would be the only sensible outcome from the CIA’s point of view – to create so much noise that the real signal drowns.

Who can think that there is a single group of people running the governments of US, UK, China, Russia and Brazil behind the scenes? And if this is not the case the global conspiracy wouldn’t work.

The much more sinister truth is that we live in the crumbling global order run by certain oligarchies especially from the US – and we can see it without even resorting to conspiracy theories because everything is clearly visible if we want to see it. That neo-classical economics is a pseudoscience laden with neoliberal ideology used to brainwash people into believing in need for the greed and overconsumption. The truth that consumerism / pseudo-growth are bad for us and our civilisation will crumble very soon unless we moderate. Yes these ideas are really dangerous – much more dangerous than stories about the 9/11. Ditch absolute property rights and blind beliefs in “endless progress” and “growth”. The Earth is limited and so we are.

Whether 9/11 was a conspiracy or not is irrelevant as what happened next really matters. Bush started 2 wars going after oil and your country is losing both of them. Your country is losing the global battle for economical and political domination – and this is a natural process which happened many times in the past to:
Roman Empire,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gokturks (this was really mind-blowing – who knows about that state?)
The Arab Caliphate,
Mongol Empire,
Timur’s Empire,
Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires,
Ottoman Empire,
Russia,
British and French colonial empires,
The USSR,

Can the US be any different? You may think that the rules of the game have changed because of the globalisation and progress. I have serious doubts in it.

Personally I don’t believe in a conspiracy but I can see an orchestrated push to get certain things across the line – made by so-called neoconservatives (in the US, UK, Australia, Israel and even Poland). On the other hand nobody ever disagreed that links existed between Brzezinski, Albright and certain Central European politicians. Another guy who was very active at that time was Karol Wojtyla – the Polish pope. The involvement of George Soros in the Georgian “revolution” has been admitted by Soros himself.

So what? If you go to Poland now and start speaking with American accent you may be pelted with eggs after the current betrayal of the most loyal (and stupid) American friend in Central Europe, willing to send as much cannon fodder to Afghanistan as requested by the American overlords. This is where Brzezinski’s policies led to. He was a hero 20 years ago. Now his ideas are outdated and obsolete.

Have I made up another conspiracy theory? No because all the information I am using comes from MSM (from different countries – you’ll not find everything written in English). You can build almost full picture of what’s going on without wasting your time on trying to determine whether 9/11 was staged by CIA, Mossad or whoever else.

The only precondition: Stop thinking like an American. Relax. Read about Gokturks. The US is not the world. It is just one country.

I like this guy because he can explain what is going on using information from the public domain and draw very far reaching conclusions (warning – he sounds like another agent):
http://pavelpodolyak.blogspot.com/

It is certainly the case that if one country deliberately undervalues its currency it can force others into trade deficits. This was Japan’s behaviour in the early post-War period, and it worked. Believers in comparative advantage always believed that such Mercantilist behaviour would simply cause domestic inflation and equalise currencies in real terms, but of course that’s nonsense.

So yes China could to some degree have been a cause of the US problem.

However the US also borrowed the money that became the Chinese surplus, so there are two sides to the causation. And US corporations have also taken advantage of provisions in its trade regulations designed to give developing countries an advantage to relocate production from the USA to China and elsewhere and export the goods back to the USA free of import duties (I’ve forgotten the specific trade provision–maybe US readers can remind us?).

So I see the causation as two-sided, and there’s too much emphasis on it being China’s fault in the USA. I therefore lean against the wind on this one.

“I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories (this was my point) so I cannot comment on them. I was arguing that even if 1 in 10 is true this stuff is largely irrelevant to understand how the global political system and the economy works.”
So even if a conspiracy is true, it is irrelevant to the global political system? As you say, you can not comment on conspiracy theories but if some are true you believe that they are irrelevant to the debate. That is making a comment or having an opinion on the subject.
People are threatened by anything that is not an officially sanctioned world view. I have said that to understand economics, one must first understand politics and for one to understand politics one must understand history. You provide this link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_Order_(conspiracy)

Pertaining to the Round Table, the writer makes on the surface a very valid point, “the latter argue that it has nearly 3,000 members, far too many for secret plans to be kept within the group,” but those who use this perceived fact as evidence of no conspiracy are unaware of (or not acknowledging) a bazaar mental condition called Dissociate Identity Disorder. I care for someone with this condition and to understand certain things which I have heard or witnessed, I have had to enter the realms of conspiracy theories to get to the information that has allowed me to know what I am dealing with. Having to read recently that Dissociate Identity Disorder is a national security secret does not help me one little bit.

Getting back to the topic of Steve Keen’s post, I will link to these videos which examine the inflation deflation debate, currency carry trades and questions the official statistics coming out of Washington.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8IDOFeN_R4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXrRpnbvZPY

As part of its growth model China put into place a number of policies that subsidized production, some directly and some indirectly. These subsidies were paid for by for by Chinese households. In words cribbed from one of his articles, “Consumption growth is primarily a function of the real growth in household income, and as households were forced to subsidize growth policies by, among other things, an undervalued currency regime, excessively low interest rates on savings deposits, sluggish wage growth, unraveling social safety nets, and manufacturing subsidies, their ability to grow consumption in line with the growth in the nation’s GDP was severely hampered. Of course the gap between production and consumption is the savings rate, and as production surged relative to consumption, a necessary corollary was a rising Chinese savings rate.’

As Chinese growth in production exceeded growth in domestic consumption, China had to run a rising trade surplus to absorb the difference. Because China mostly accumulated dollars and so recycled the surplus into the US, the US had to run the accompanying deficits. This caused the tradable goods sector in the US to contract, especially since China competed most effectively not in labor intensive industries but rather in capital intensive industries (thanks to an extremely low cost of capital). The Fed should have counteracted by raising interest rates but didn’t because they wanted to keep unemployment low. The result was that US consumption grew faster than US production, and that meant that US debt levels and trade deficits rose.

By this view the global imbalances were a function both of Chinese industrial policies aimed at “turbo-charging” (his words) growth at the expense of Chinese household income and consumption and the refusal of the Fed to counteract Chinese trade policies. This doesn’t mean that “it is all China’s fault” (Pettis always makes a point of insisting that bad policies in both countries were required, but of course in the current climate you can only blame the US fully or blame China fully).

Do you agree with his argument? If not, where do you think he errs? Actually Pettis has mentioned your blog several times favorably, so I assume he will read this comment. Professor, have I stated it correctly?