An interesting thought which I have never seen in print before...

I am on record as saying that export driven economies are unsustainable because it is impossible for everyone to be a net exporter and it is impossible for a net importer to take on infinite debt in order to continue being a net importer forever.  This is why the notion of "export economy world" isn't just a myth, it's a mathematical impossibility.  When something is presented as truth despite defying the laws of math or physics, I call that a scam.  In this case, the scam is the old vendor finance scam.  You export products to people who cannot afford them.  They "pay" you not with goods in return trade but rather with IOUs that they cannot and thus will not ever pay off.

So while the above is old news to the point of being obvious, my new epiphany is that a debt based global money supply REQUIRES someone with good credit to play the role of net importer.  Without this role being played by one of the actors on the global economic stage, the net exporters quickly get defaulted on and then they have to admit that net exportation is a scam driven by their industrialists (AKA military industrial complex) on the rest of the players (honest daily workers) in the society.

The US has played that role at the global level since we defaulted on gold convertibility. We now owe $17.5 trillion dollars to creditors.  We will never pay that back because we cannot pay it back.  So what is happening now is that the US is preparing itself for a new world in which we cannot borrow other people's stuff.  In the light of this context we should not be surprised to see hyper automated manufacturing returning to the US and for the US to suddenly come up with enough petroleum to be a net exporter of petroleum based products.

Without someone playing the role of the massive net importer, and I mean someone with good enough credit that it is possible to convince anyone that they will ever pay back the loans, the whole export economy thing cannot happen!  Once we get to that point what is left?  I think that the Brookings Institution is on the right track: global currency wars.  The only thing left is for governments to devalue their money so badly relative to other country's devaluations that at some point either the global export economy collapses (China, Japan, etc.) and everyone just produces what they need for themselves OR we break out into WW3.  The industrialists would, of course, prefer WW3 because of the creative destruction thing that I mentioned in these pages before.

One way or another major change is coming and there is little to nothing that can be done to stop it.