Chris, I think your problem is that you seriously underestimate how degenerate and shameless modern capitalism has become. You are still trying to look at it as if it was run in everybody's interest. You are 25 years late.
I was a Director of the IPE (now ICEFutures) and blew the whistle in 2000/2001 on how the investment banks were (and still are) milking the oil (and energy) markets, and got shafted because of it.
So yes, I do understand how shameless modern capitalism has become more clearly than most, both in terms of inside knowledge and personal experience.
You are assuming that the rest of the world will look on blithely, watch the Fed pumping in gazillions of dollars to bail out banks' balance sheets, and do nothing about it.
It simply won't happen. The dollar would disappear up it's own backside.
The Japanese had to work things out over time, and the same discipline will IMHO be forced upon the US.
Credit intermediation is finished in the US and Wall Street is going to have to find an alternative. "Any economic unit can emit money. The serious problem is to get it accepted" Hyman Minsky
Those fuckers would sell their country into slavery if they could and it'd help them to make a buck. So blowing up their own currency, they won't care a wit. They won't be the ones suffering.
