Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

128 страница из 137

The appreciation in the yen set off a buying spree by Japanese companies overseas. In September 1989, the Sony Corporation bought Columbia Pictures for $3.4 billion in cash, then the largest acquisition in the US by a Japanese company.ssss1 Two months later, Mitsubishi paid $846 million for a 51 percent stake in Manhattan's Rockefeller Centre.ssss1 In what has been seen as a symbol of the excesses of the time, the Imperial Palace grounds in Tokyo were famously estimated to be worth more than all of California. Popular consternation about Japan ‘buying up America’ reached a crescendo. Then the Japanese bubble burst. Since the end of 1989, Japan has fallen into seemingly perpetual economic stagnation.

By the early 1990s, with its major economic challenger in decline and its major military and geopolitical rival collapsing, the US was at the zenith of its power. Even as new challenges began to mount up in subsequent decades, however, the dollar has gone from strength to strength.

The framework put in place by Harry White at Bretton Woods put the dollar at the heart of the global monetary system. Policies pursued by successive US administrations after WW2 enabled the widespread adoption of the dollar as the dominant currency for international capital raising and investment. Financial institutions, notably in the City of London, grasped the commercial opportunity that this offered, supported by local governments and regulators. As capital market flows came to far outstrip commercial trade flows and global payments and market infrastructure developed around the dollar-based system, the dollar's position in the global monetary order became more entrenched. By the time that President Nixon severed the dollar's tie to gold, there was no credible alternative to take its place.