The global collapse causes a recession in the United States.

The Davos Forum (WES) has noticed this no global recovery expected in 2022not even in the attenuated form of low economic growth and high inflation (“stagflation”), but a recession in the world economy, caused by a real “perfect storm”, to which the war in Ukraine, high inflation, the food insecurity, high energy prices, confinement in large Chinese cities (such as Shanghai and others), the devaluation of the currencies of emerging countries and, above all, the crucial fact that there was a break in the coordination and cooperation mechanisms of the phenomenon of globalizationwhich is the structural core of 21st century capitalism.

Kristalina Georgieva, chief executive of the IMF, had already warned this in her speech at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington 30 days ago, where she pointed out that there is actually three overlapping crises in the global economy of 2022: the coronavirus pandemic, not over yet; the war in Ukraine, transformed into a long-term global conflict pitting the United States against Russia; and finally, decisively, the break in the globalization process due to the outbreak of a new Cold War led by the US and the West against Russia and China, and which is taking place both in Europe and in Asia.

There in Japan, President Joe Biden told China that he will go to war for Taiwan if he tries to take the island back by force under any circumstances.

This rupture of globalization it contradicts its nature as an expression of the current phase of capitalist accumulationwhere it is synonymous with definitive and irreversible integration of the system through global production chains, represented by 88,000 global companies and their 600,000 associates and affiliates, of which 44% are North American and 25% Chinese.

This led the US to experience the highest level of inflation in 40 years, with 8.5% per annum in March and 8.3% in April, which forced the Federal Reserve to raise rates. interest rate of 0.5% per annum in one go, with the forecast to increase 7 times this year.

What is predictable now is that it will be activated in the United States, the world’s leading economy, a deep and prolonged recession this year or next yearwith a profound and immediate consequence for the global system.

The Institute of International Finance (IIF) warned last week that Wall Street’s brutal falls over the past 15 days are a result of the virtual certainty that exists in the world’s leading financial center about the proximity of a global recession. dropped by more than 18% since the beginning of the year).

Everything indicates that the US inflation rate has “normalized” to an average level of 8% per annum, while the potential real interest rate in the United States is below 2% per annum.

Paul Volcker managed to control American inflation in the 1980s when he doubled the interest rate relative to the inflation level, bringing it up to 21% per annum in the first 3 months of 1981.

That is why they warn that the annual decline of 1.4% in the first quarter of the year anticipates an underlying trendclearly recessive, in 2022 and 2023.

This happens when US demand has grown dramatically over the past two yearsin which it has risen by more than 6% per year.

Thus, for example, nominal demand has increased by more than 12% since the first quarter of 2021, while unemployment has fallen to 3.5%, the second lowest level in North American history since 1950; and this happens when the extraordinarily buoyant US supply is held back only by the constraint that exists in the available workforce. Today, strictly speaking, the United States is in a situation of over-employment (more jobs are being created than there are people capable of filling them).

The rule established by Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve for 18 years, is that markets anticipate trends. Hence the drastic drop on Wall Street, which caused the Nasdaq to drop by 30% in the first 3 months of the year, which represents a loss of $ 12 billion, half of US GDP.

Economic crises, like strategic or political ones, always are determined and specificand are unleashed in one place and with unmissable protagonists.

This forces us to exclude any kind of catastrophic temptation, because capitalism expands through crisesand not outside of them, especially in the case of the current global system, completely integrated by the technical revolution.

But it must be added that even global crises like the current one have a beginning and a starting pointwhich in this case is the war in Ukraine and the effect on the world economy of trade and financial sanctions on Russia.

This is which caused the current breakdown of the integration and cooperation mechanismwhich affects the very structural nature of the integrated transnational productive system, which is 21st century capitalism.