Why, despite the existence of raft of potential international investment outlets, is a major share of global wealth and savings impelled toward a United States (US) Wall Street-centered casino ? Why has an increasingly gaping chasm crystallized between ever bloating global financial activities and the real world economy of production and trade? How is it that wealthy governmentsinjecting trillions of dollars into stumbling financial sectors across the globe is failing to create one new decent job? This book connects the dots linking the 2008 meltdown--and over a decade of dress rehearsals for it--to a rigged global financial game that is unraveling the very foundations of modernity. This game cemented US international dominance even as it simultaneously attained the status of worlds principal debtor economy. In a nutshell, the rigged global game undergirding Axis power is that of dollar seigniorage. The US furnishes international money for the cost of running a printing press while the rest of the world produces goods and services, competing to push wages to the bottom to access those dollars. Select states, predominately Japan and China (though others as well), then store the surpluses they amass in dollar denominated savings. The US access to investment capital through little substantive economic effort, as it in fact incurs exponentially burgeoning debt, underpinned its seemingly out-of-this-world economic performance across the 1990s and early 21st century. The book deftly explores the set of momentous though largely unrecognized consequences for the global future which flow from this rigged game.

Richard Westra 's teaching has taken him around the world including Queen's University and Royal Military College, Canada, the International Study Centre, in East Sussex, College of The Bahamas, Nassau and Pukyong National University, South Korea. He has been a Visiting Research Fellow at Focus on the Global South/Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute, Bangkok, Thailand. Currently he is Designated Associate Professor of Political Science, Graduate School of Law, Nagoya University, Japan. His work has been published in numerous international academic journals. He has authored and edited ten books including Political Economy and Globalization, Routledge, 2009 and Confronting Global Neoliberalism: Third World Resistance and Development Strategies, Clarity Press, 2010.