tails of their proposai at the September 1988 IMF/World Bank meetings in West Berlin. Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady went out of his way to record his displeasure, with the statement that the United States «regards with skepticism proposals that may appear to conform to the basic principles of the debt stra-tegy, but which in practice only produce an illusion of progress»38. Evidently the Treasury want Japan's participation to consist 100 per cent of putting up the money and 0 per cent of constructive suggestions, and is not satisfied with 98 per cent and 2.
American economie policy-makers should be passing some of the hegemonic burden on to multilateral institutions, for example considering a Japanese candidate for the next Managing Director of the Imf and supporting the integrity of the institu-tion under its current Managing Director, Michel Camdessus. Instead, the Treasury has begun recently to treat the Imf as an agency of the Us Government. It evidently sought to over-ride normal produceres on a recent Fund loan to Argentina, something the Treasury never tried to do even in the years of the Donald Regan autocracy39. [The Americans ignored entire-ly a statement at Berlin by Bank of Japan Governor Satoshi Sumita, which was considered as important by Japanese economie policy-makers as the debt initiative: that they now favor and increased reserve-currency role for the yen in the international monetary system40].
It is difficult to see what in the mechanics of international relations will force Us policy-makers to accept a loss of power in the near-term.
If one is in a fundamentally weak bargaining position but doesn't know it, one is not in such a weak bargaining position after ali.
But the Us government's financial inability to continue to spend so lavishly on defense, and the inability to incur new foreign aid expenditures or to acknowledge losses on existing loans to troubled debtors, is already forcing it to ask financial assistance from Japan. It is only a matter of time before Americans learn to bow like a Japanese when making such requests.
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