If we can see past their leaders, both the USA and China have extremely threatening economic issues to be solved.

Since ‘post-industrialisation’, financialisation of the economy in the USA has amounted to the inflation and the grabbing of asset values. Industrial capitalism has been thoroughly replaced by rentier capitalism.

The USA could be characterised as ‘Wall Street Rent-Seeking versus The People’.

Industry is thriving in China, of course, but localities are doing very poorly, having sold out their future rents to the cities. So, it’s a matter of ‘The Cities v. The Localities’.

Who’s better-placed to solve their respective issues?

This is a wide-ranging economic discussion between Pepe Escobar and Michael Hudson for those people able to see beyond the words ‘capitalism’ and ‘communism’ if we are to understand the failure of both the West and East to publicly capture their ground rents.

h/t Alanna Hartog and the Henry George School