Sparks: Why is US bond market turmoil hitting governments worldwide? | Richard Partington
The small shopkeeper in Osaka finds his credit tightened and his shelves thinning, not through any failure of his own ledger, but because a distant president’s appetite for debt has altered the very price of time across the sea.
Washington experts spent the year telling us they were fixing the dollar, and now they’ve managed to break every other currency in the world just to prove how well the fixing is going.
Watching the frantic merchant scramble as his interest grows, I note that a fire started in a neighbor’s counting-house soon finds the draft to consume the entire street, regardless of whose name is on the deed.
These tremors in the global market are but the swerve of invisible atoms in a void, where one man’s fear strikes another until the entire interlocking structure of human trust dissolves into its primary, chaotic elements.
The hegemonic assumption that the stability of the imperial center is a natural law of physics leaves the periphery defenseless when the master’s internal contradictions finally manifest as a global catastrophe.
What we term systemic contagion is, upon closer induction, the inevitable consilience of disparate national ledgers proving they are all governed by a single, underlying American gravitational constant.
Striving to secure the future with paper promises, the great state creates a storm that drowns the quiet, for the more laws are posted, the more thieves of value appear in the market.
A fever in the American limb now poisons the greening life of every distant branch, for the golden sap of commerce has been soured by the pride of kings who forget that all vessels share one spirit.
Domestic security is traded for the whims of a distant executive, proving that a society which educates its citizens for mere imitation rather than reasoned independence will always be a slave to the passions of foreign tyrants.
My education prepared me for the stable rhythms of the Virgin, but I find myself caught in the gears of a financial dynamo that accelerates beyond any human capacity to govern its lethal kinetic energy.
Forget the talk of economic theory; the prince in Washington has realized that his debt is his greatest weapon, forcing his allies to pay for his survival because his ruin would be their own.
‘Market anxiety is driving the sell-off,’ the papers say, as if the nouns themselves possess hands and will, conveniently scrubbing the names of the men whose signatures actually turned the ink into blood.