主题：【讨论】“六个月之后不会再有投行存在了”。 -- 厚积薄发

Fourth, the foreign creditors of the US are getting tired of financing the US in the form of low-yielding US Treasuries. Thus the switch of such reserve holdings to SWFs that are planning to make large equity investments possibly with actual control of corporate firms and financial institutions that are desperate for capital to recapitalize themselves. But this desire of our creditors to get equity investments – the gems of the US corporate world - rather than low yield debt instruments is hitting the political backlash of financial protectionism as the UNOCAL- CNOOC, the Dubai Ports cases and the likely protectionist reform of the CIFIUS process of approving FDI in the US suggest. But a country that needs to borrow from abroad 700 to 800 billion dollar a year to finance its external deficit cannot afford to be too choosy on the ways – equity rather than debt – that its lenders and creditors want to finance those deficits. The first rule of good manners if you are a guest is that you don't spit on the plate from which your host is feeding you. But in its creeping financial protectionism the US thinks it can dictate to other countries the form and the terms of the financing of its twin deficits. This attitude will not be allowed by such creditors to last much longer.

The ensuing decline of the US dollar as the main reserve currency will take time and will not occur overnight; but it is inexorable given the relative fall in US economic, financial and geopolitical power. Already Russia is flexing its muscle and pushing for an international role of the ruble; the euro is rising as a major reserve currency; central banks and SWFs will slowly but surely start to diversify away from dollar assets especially as the Bretton Woods 2 regime starts to unravel; and even the RMB may become the dominant currency in Asia in the next decade as capital controls are slowly removed in China. It will take little time – if the secular decline of the value of the dollar continues – for oil and other commodities to be priced in currencies other than the dollar or in a basket of currencies.

All these changes in the economic, financial, reserve currency and geopolitical role and relative power of the US will not occur overnight. But the trend is clear. The rise of the BRICs and other emerging market economies; the continuation of the process of economic and political integration in Europe; the US policy mistakes in economic, financial and foreign policies will steadily erode the power of the American Empire. This process will not be sudden and will take a couple of decades. But the trend is clear: the brief period of unipolar power of the American hyperpower is now over and a new age of balance of great powers is starting in the world. Also, the rise of non governmental actors – multinational corporations, NGOs, terrorist groups, non-nation state powers, failed and unstable states, non-traditional global players – will radically change the traditional balance of power as the power of nation states will shrink relative to that of other global players.

Whether the decline of an hegemonic power providing global public goods – security, free trade, freer mobility of capital and people, inducements to free markets and democracy, better environment, peace – will lead to a more stable world with many powers multilaterally cooperating on these global economic, financial and geopolitical issues; or whether the absence of such stable hegemonic power will lead to a more unstable world characterized by conflicts – economic, political and even military – among traditional nation states, great powers and non-traditional actors is an open and difficult issue. But it is certain that the decline of the American Empire has started.