…The narrative draws upon

‘The Three Gulf Wars of American Hegemony: tracking the decay of the unipolar moment’

by Seva Gunitsky, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto
https://hegemon.substack.com/p/the-three-gulf-wars-of-american-hegemony

…What follows James Meadway’s Gulf War tour is an excellent 4-minute segment setting out the parameters of government borrowing and along the way the limits of MMT, in a way that is easy to follow for an economics layperson like me.

Transcribed below (look, Ma, no LLMs used to do so!)…

…1/9
“One of the war’s immediate consequences is the rise in gov borrowing costs across much of the world and most definitely in the UK, which saw its gov borrowing costs rise to 5% and above.

The reason is the UK is highly exposed to the rest of the world.

We import 40% of our food, 50% of the natural gas we use, and about 60% of our fertiliser.

And our gov owes about a third of its debt to people and institutions in the rest of the world. An unusually high level for a ‘developed’ country…