As the French economist Jacques Rueff once warned, the dollar regime creates an international balance of payments system that functions like a game of marbles in which, after each round, ‘the winners return their marbles to the losers’, as Washington’s creditors invest the dollars they receive for goods sold to the us in dollar-denominated instruments in order to keep their own currencies competitive, while the us could simply print more dollars to pay its bills.18 In successive decades the Germans, Japanese and Chinese learned this lesson. Its effect was to boost credit creation and mask the weakening of the us economy.

Robin Blackburn – Crisis 2.0 a New Left Review