The taproots feeding financial power are real estate rent, natural resource rent and monopoly rent.... Instead of investing in plant and equipment to… - Michael Hudson

The end of America’s unchallenged global economic dominance has arrived sooner than expected, thanks to the very same Neocons who gave the world the Iraq, Syria and the dirty wars in Latin America... The United State['s]... violent regime change warfare against Venezuela and Syria – and threatening other countries with sanctions if they do not join this crusade – is driving European and other nations to create their alternative financial institutions....

Those who obtain or inherit predatory wealth and privilege realize the ultimate means of imposing austerity and demolishing the power of democracies is deception, junk economics....

America is basically the blob, the State Department, the C.I.A., the national security state, and its ideology is to shift economic planning away from government to Wall Street and other financial centers in England and France. And I don’t see that financialization and neoliberalism changing. That’s their religion. And you’re going to have, instead of the reform that you’d like to see, you’re going to see an increasingly violent vicious fight against anyone proposing this reform, just as they fought against Allende in Chile and against against Cuba and as they’re fighting against China and Russia today.