Lexy

Niall Ferguson: Dollar Is Doomed, U.S. Empire Over

I believe the inference was "financial" empire and not in the context of an imperial power in the classic sense.

On Oct 20 11:58 PM Teutonic Knight wrote:

> Wait a Minute, Professor Ferguson, did you say "American Empire"?
>
>
> The video reminds me of a related good read from another British,
> Professor Bernard Porter's "Empire and Super-Empire" where it would
> perfectly illustrate such profound, absurd and outdated Anglo-Saxon
> views of the United States of America.
>
> The notion of an "American Empire" is a cold case in history, akin
> to an Ultimate Mystery - An Empire that never was. Unlike the illustrious
> Roman Empire which at least had the Five Good Emperors (and Hadrian
> was a Standout, kicking in the Hadrian Era), the Americans are either
> an ultimate hypocrisy, or an God-ordained benevolence to Mankind.
> Toward the end of the 19th Century, President McKinley was pursuing
> his expansionary policies while Mark Twain adamantly advocated anti-colonialism
>
>
> We took over the Phillippines after a brief and brutal war only to
> giving it up after some 50 years, and now we are saddled with a 20
> plus-year wait backlog of would-be immigrants from that now independent
> country .
>
> In short, we are forever caught in that giant space of indecision
> - to be, or not to be - An Empire!
>
> Admittedly, we had been in rapid decline, economically, politically,
> and morally (my view) ever since the sixties, and the two mainstream
> political parties are now in a state of decay.
>
> As for the Chinese? Well, only the fools would think that they are
> our friends, and we theirs. Since our involvement of their Civil
> War in 1949, and continuing to this date as I write, you could well
> count on that hegemony tug of war between these two powers.
>
> America is still a bit of a mystery to me as a foreign-born person.
> It is perhaps the hardest country to be understood in the history
> of all mankind.
>
> Teutonic Knight