Globalno liberalno gospodarstvo, kot smo ga poznali do sedaj, je lahko delovalo samo na podlagi implicitnega dogovora, da ZDA s svojim velikim trgovinskim deficitom posrkajo proizvodne izvozne presežke neto izvoznic (Japonske, držav EU, Kitajske, Mehike, Vietnama in še nekaj “tovarniških držav”) v zameno, da slednje svoje finančne presežke iz tega naslova transferirajo v nakupe ameriških vrednostnih papirjev in nepremičnin. Drugače rečeno, globalno liberalno gospodarstvo je lahko delovalo le tako, da so države neto izvoznice financirale ameriški trgovinski deficit. En kitajski diplomat je ta implicitni dogovor opisal kot “mračni dogovor” (Dark deal). In s tem mračnim dogovorom so bili vsi srečni – države neto izvoznice in ameriški tehnološki in casino kapitalisti. Dokler zadeva ni počila na točki, ko je ameriški nekdanji srednji razred, ki je v tem procesu izgubil nekoč dobro plačane in sindikalno zaščitene službe v industrijskih podjetjih poiskal zatočišče pri – najbolj neverjetno možnem zaščitniku – Donaldu Trumpu. Ki se je odločil, da to globalno liberalno gospodarsko ureditev razmontira. 

Ni čisto jasno, zakaj in kaj lahko iz tega nastane, vsaj meni ne, vendar dejstvo je, da ga Trump želi ubiti in razmontirati. Toda s smrtjo mračnega dogovora prihaja tudi smrt političnega centra, ki je svoj obstoj utemeljeval v multilateralni globalni liberalni ureditvi. Z njenim koncem prihaja vzpon ekonomskega in posledično tudi političnega nacionalizma, seveda pod taktirko strank, ki so zelo oddalajene od političnega centra.

Če vam diši po začetku 1930. let, takoj po finančnem kolapsu in ameriškem protekcionizmu (Smoot-Hawleyev zakon iz 1930), razpadu globalne liberalne gospodarske ureditve in posledičnem vzponu fašističnih strank, morda tudi je kaj na tem. Prezgodaj je za delanje sklepov, toda problem je, da je, ko vzorec že zaznamo v polni jasnosti, že prepozno.

Spodaj je dober opis tega tega “mračnega dogovora” s strani Yanisa Varoufakisa.

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The essence of this global mechanism (which I once labelled the Global Minotaur) is simple. Since the Seventies, America’s deficits have provided East Asia (first Japan, then China) and Europe (primarily Germany) the demand for their factories’ manufactures. In return, the European Union, Japan and later China sent their accumulated profits to Wall Street to be recycled into US private and public debt, some equities, and real estate. A Chinese official once described this mechanism to me as a “dark deal”. “Our Dark Deal with the Americans,” the official explained, “turns on the US trade deficit, which keeps demand for our manufactures high. In return, our capitalists invest the bulk of their dollar superprofits into America’s FIRE”. (The acronym stands for “Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.”) “Once this process got underway, America shifted much of its industrial production to our shores.”

The problem with this global recycling mechanism was that, to function smoothly, it had to generate larger and larger imbalances: greater trade deficits for the US and more accumulated savings for Northern Europe and East Asia. But there are limits to how large imbalances can grow. Ruptures are inevitable. The longer they are delayed, the greater the pain they inflict — a truth that centrists never acknowledged, not even when it was tearing down their houses.

Trump’s greatest strength comes from asking the pressing question that the centrists refuse to countenance: what comes after the Dark Deal? What comes after the imbalances built on the US trade deficit have proven unsustainably massive? Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, put it succinctly in a recent speech at the IMF: “Everywhere we look across the international economic system today, we see imbalance… This status quo of large and persistent imbalances is not sustainable… The persistent over-reliance on the United States for demand is resulting in an evermore unbalanced global economy.”

Their proposed solutions may be wrongheaded, half-baked, even crazy, but at least Trump’s team has identified the problem. Voters may not understand that these unsustainable imbalances are at the root of their plight, but enough of them have the sixth sense to intuit that Trump’s people are on to something, unlike the centrists who act like King Canute ordering the tides of discontent to reverse course.

Inexcusably, centrists treat Bessent and the rest of Trump’s economic team as Neanderthals. They forget that the people they celebrate as the architects of the globalised capitalist order, an order which they now mourn, had warned them in good time. On 10 April 2005, when no one was interested in bad news stories, Paul Volcker, the man who had helped design the devastating Nixon Shock and later headed the Federal Reserve during the formative years of the Dark Deal, foreshadowed everything Bessent is now saying:

“What holds [the US economic success story] all together is a massive and growing flow of capital from abroad, running to more than $2 billion every working day, and growing… As a nation we don’t consciously borrow or beg. We aren’t even offering attractive interest rates, nor do we have to offer our creditors protection against the risk of a declining dollar… We fill our shops and our garages with goods from abroad, and the competition has been a powerful restraint on our internal prices. It’s surely helped keep interest rates exceptionally low despite our vanishing savings and rapid growth. And it’s comfortable for our trading partners and for those supplying the capital. Some, such as China, depend heavily on our expanding domestic markets. And for the most part, the central banks of the emerging world have been willing to hold more and more dollars, which are, after all, the closest thing the world has to a truly international currency… The difficulty is that this seemingly comfortable pattern can’t go on indefinitely.”

Three years later, Wall Street crashed. Two decades of centrist denial followed, bought at the price of gigantic money printing for the few and harsh austerity for the many. With Volcker and his ilk sidelined by the governing centrists, the political centre began to fragment across the West — with deficit countries like France, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom (not to mention my country, Greece) closer to the eye of the storm. It was only a matter of time before someone like Trump would rise up, the inevitable outcome of the centrists’ refusal to acknowledge that the global surplus recycling mechanism, the Dark Deal, was dead in the water — just as its predecessor, the Bretton Woods system, was before President Nixon killed it in 1971.

Sure enough, Trump’s policies are unlikely to rebalance the world economy. While some manufacturing will return to America, automation will render this a jobless growth surge. Big Tech’s burgeoning cloud rents will further undermine any actual rebalancing. China will probably move on, gradually transforming the Brics into a Bretton Woods-style system anchored by the yuan. The European Union will fail to rebalance its internal macroeconomy, sinking deeper into stagnation. The planet’s climate will go haywire.

But, though Trump’s policies may not work in the US, France, Australia, Canada or anywhere else, his willingness to upend a broken global system is enough to garner political support for, at home, unprecedented authoritarianism; and abroad, a confrontation with China that casts doubt on our species’ long-term prospects. Meanwhile, centrists stuck in their delusion that the Dark Deal can be sustained are condemned to keep losing even when they win.

Vir: Yanis Varoufakis, UnHerd