Abstract
By early 2009, the economic relationship between the United States and east Asia was first and foremost defined by the financial relationship between the United States and China. Putting together the holdings of the Chinese central bank, the state-owned banks, and China’s sovereign wealth fund, Brad Setser and Arpanda Pandey have estimated that in early 2009 China held foreign assets of about $2.3 trillion, the equivalent of more than 50 per cent of China’s GDP. Around 70 per cent of these assets were denominated in dollars.1 During 2008, China provided more than 50 per cent of the capital flows required to finance the American current account deficit, and by that year’s end China was holding about twice as many foreign exchange reserves as Japan.2
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Notes
M. Goldstein and N. R. Lardy, The Future of China’s Exchange Rate Policy: Policy Analyses in International Economics 87 (Peterson Institute for International Economics: Washington DC, 2009), p. 33.
H. Thompson, ‘Debt and Power: The United States’ Debt in Historical Perspective’, International Relations, 21 3 (2007) 305–323.
L. Jacobs and D. King, ‘America’s Political Class: The Unsustainable State in a Time of Unraveling’, Political Science and Politics, 42 2 (2009) 2.
More generally on the institutional fragmentation of the American state in historical context see S. Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Kevin Gotham, ‘The Secondary Circuit of Capital Reconsidered: Globalisation and the US Real Estate Sector’, American Journal of Sociology, 112 1 (2006) 231–275.
See, for example, P. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalisation in Question, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999);
L. Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State: Governing the Economy in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998);
E. Helleiner, States and the Re-emergence of Global Finance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994);
L. Mosley, Global Capital and National Governments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
D. Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalisation, Institutions and Economic Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007);
C. Hay, ‘Globalisation’s Impact on States’, in J. Ravenhill (ed.) Global Political Economy, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
See, for example, G. Garrett, Partisan Politics in the Global Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
N. Philipps, ‘“Globalising” the Study of International Political Economy’, in N. Philipps (ed.) Globalising International Political Economy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 16.
For an analytical historical account of the interaction of the interdepen-dencies created by trade and security issues see Ronald Finlay and Kevin O’Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War and the World Economy in the Second Millennium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
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© 2010 Helen Thompson
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Thompson, H. (2010). Conclusions. In: China and the Mortgaging of America. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283305_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283305_6
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