It's basic macro. Assets, exports, capital accounts, current accounts, savings, investment. Essentially, windfall surplus in one area causes savings bubbles causes investment bubbles causes asset pumps and export dumps, usually in a different area. He cites a bunch of historical examples and then goes step by step through techniques for identifying sources/sinks and directionality.

Oh, and did you know that Ricardo based his analysis on the assumption of a closed capital account? It's interesting how the theory of comparative advantage usually gets invoked without mentioning that ;)

If you dogmatically reject the idea that political economy could possibly involve the concept of class, I'd love to hear how your analysis clusters the interests involved. In any case, he's not a CCP shill. He throws some mean punches in that direction with facts and figures to back them up. Everyone hustles in the world economy.

> If you dogmatically reject the idea that political economy could possibly involve the concept of class,

Class is a suitcase word that may refer to different ways of classifying people but often does not clarify which dimensions and clusters are being used in a particular context. Maybe Pettis does a better job than other authors. Perhaps you or the sibling comment author can provide an example?

You do yourself a tremendous disservice by blowing off good scholarship with uninformed jokes, especially in the case of book publishing, where titles are often set by the publisher and not the author.

This book gives detailed, and very accurate, descriptions of how trade wars which appear to be foreign conflicts-- i.e. one country united against another-- are almost always actually domestic conflicts between competing interest groups inside the same country; often during these conflicts, those interest groups can make alliances with equivalent groups in other countries. This is a commonly-observed phenomenon which, for brevity's sake, we reify as class, and does not require any Marxist axioms or analysis to understand.