Für die Freunde des Kapitalismus liegen die Ursachen der aktuellen Krise hauptsächlich in Exzess, Gier und der Bushregierung, also in Abweichungen vom guten Kapitalismus, von der guten Politik - soll heißen: von der Wirtschaftspolitik der Clinton Administration. //Exzess, Gier, Devianz: // Eine bessere Erklärung aus dem Jahr 2004:

This structural crisis has been masked by the unprecedented expansion of US consumer debts, which now exceed US$9 trillion, or 90 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). This is collateralized by the wealth effect of high returns on worker pension funds invested in the stock market and the inflated value of their homes. Total credit-market debt for all sectors is now 299 percent of GDP. In 1984, when consumer debt stood at only 50 percent of GDP, it drove the market three years later, in 1987, to a severe crash, which Greenspan bailed out with a flood of liquidity that released the biggest financial bubble in history - it burst first in Asia in 1997 and finally in the US in 2001.

Imports from low-wage countries such as China are resold in the United States at a greater profit margin for US importers than that enjoyed by Chinese exporters. Thus a $2 toy leaving a US-owned factory in China is a $3 shipment arriving at San Diego. By the time a US consumer buys it for $10 at Wal-Mart, the US economy registers $10 in final sales, less $3 import cost, for a $7 addition to the US GDP. This yields a ratio of GDP gain to import value of two-and-a-third.

Chinese GDP gain to export value ratio is zero if the $2 export price becomes part of the US capital account surplus. If half of the $2 export price is used for paying return to foreign capital, then the ratio is in fact negative. The numbers for other product types vary, but the pattern is similar. The $1.439 trillion of imports to the United States in 2002 were directly responsible for some $3.35 trillion of US GDP, almost 32 percent of its $10.45 trillion economy. That is why US policymakers have no incentive to reduce the trade deficit. But during a presidential campaign, blaming it on China's undervalued yuan gets votes.

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Greater profit margins enjoyed by the importing economy raise apparent productivity because sales per employee increase from the factory floor toward delivery to the consumer. Thus the productivity growth in the US has been achieved by having cheap labor doing the producing overseas.

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Highly indebted emerging market economies, through the undervaluation of their currencies to subsidize exports, ironically make dollar debts more expensive to repay in local currency terms. The moderating impact on US price inflation also amplifies the upward trend of the trade-weighted dollar index despite persistent US expansion of dollar monetary aggregates, also known as money printing. Adjusting for this debt-driven increase in the value of the dollar, import volume into the US grew with the expansion of dollar monetary aggregates, around 15 percent annually for most of the 1990s. The US enjoyed a booming economy when the exchange value of the dollar was rising, at a time when interest rates in the US were higher than those in its creditor nations.

This led to the odd effect that rising US interest rates actually prolonged the boom in the United States rather than restrained it, because they caused massive inflows of liquidity into the US financial system, lowered import-price inflation, increased apparent productivity and prompted further spending by US consumers enriched by the wealth effect of rising equity and real-estate markets despite a slowing of wage increases.

This was precisely what Fed chairman Greenspan did in the 1990s in the name of preemptive measures against inflation. Dollar hegemony enabled the United States to print dollars to fight domestic inflation, causing a huge debt bubble with price deflation, pushing up equity prices, which is called growth, not inflation.

[Henry C K Liu, Blaming 'undervalued' yuan wins votes, Asia Times, 26. Feber 2004]

Eine kleine Anmerkung: genauso wie Dubai als das nachzuahmende Modell mindestens für die arabische Welt, wenn nicht darüber hinaus, hingestellt wird, obwohl Dubais Wirtschaft gerade darauf basiert, dass es selbst eine herausgehobene Stellung innerhalb der arabischen Welt und darüberhinaus innnehat, die nahezu unbegrenzte Kapitalzuflüsse ermöglicht, wurde (und wird bald wieder) das amerikanische Modell für den Rest der Welt als verbindlich angesehen, obwohl - wie man oben sehen kann - dieses Modell auf der herausgehobenen Stellung der USA beruht, die nahezu unbegrenzte Kapitalzuflüsse ermöglicht. Eine zentrale Unwahrheit der bürgerlichen Ideologie ist es, strukturelle Ungleichheiten zu ignorieren, und in verschiedensten Formen immer wieder denselben Satz zu wiederholen: "Alle können reich sein!" Dieser Satz ist nicht nur semantisch unwahr (wenn alle reich sind, ist niemand reich), sondern er verneint das Wesen des Kapitalismus: denn nur wenn die einen arm sind, können die anderen reich sein; nur wenn es Länder mit riesigen Kapitalüberschüssen aus der Ölforderung gibt, können in Dubai (und nur in Dubai) die Hochhäuser in den Himmel wachsen; nur wenn es arme Länder gibt, die praktisch ohne Gegenleistung Waren und Kapital exportieren, können die USA (und nur die USA) konsumieren ohne Ende und dem Rest der Welt eine vorbildhafte, produktive Wirtschaft vorgaukeln.