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Shocking Scenarios: Rapid Economic Contraction May Lead to New Wars and
Radicalized Politics
By Arun Gupta, Indypendent. 

Economic contraction could provoke: confrontation between U.S. and China or
an unraveling of the European Union.

As the global economy heads for its first annual decline since WWII and the
biggest decline in trade in 80 years, more and more commentators are using
the term depression to describe the vertiginous economic collapse.

The rate of the decline is astonishing. Nouriel Roubini, a.k.a. “Dr.
Doom,” writes, “The scale and speed of synchronized global economic
contraction is really unprecedented (at least since the Great Depression),
with a free fall of GDP, income, consumption, industrial production,
employment, exports, imports, residential investment and, more ominously,
capital expenditures around the world.”

During the Great Depression the global economy fragmented, leading to the
rise of competing power blocs. Eventually, fascist Germany and imperial
Japan launched wars of conquest for new markets and lands because they
lacked the territorial and trade outlets possessed by the United States,
England and the Soviet Union.

This crisis is at an early stage, but the process of global fragmentation
has already begun, which means a greater likelihood of interstate military
conflict. With the fading of the “war on terror” as the central U.S.
battleground, China will probably return as the pre-eminent peril in the
minds of the U.S. economic and political elite.

Recently, a sea-going confrontation and China’s lecturing the United
States over debt indicates how the powers are skirmishing over military and
economic interests.
Lees verder: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/135288/shocking_scenarios:_rapid_economic_contraction_may_lead_to_new_wars_and_radicalized_politics/