Debt, Dollar, and Decline: How the Crisis of Empire Opens the Road to Liberation

Inevitable by Design: How Empire Turns Crisis into Common Sense

Let’s start where the ruling class wants us to end—with the illusion of fate. In his Euractiv column, “The Next Financial Crisis Is Unavoidable—and American,” Bruno Colmant doesn’t just predict a financial collapse—he naturalizes it. He speaks like a weary prophet of capital, the kind who mistakes the tremors of empire for the heartbeat of humanity itself. Every line hums with inevitability. The coming crisis, he assures us, will be “systemic, inevitable, and insidious”—a force of nature, not the logical outcome of a system built on exploitation and plunder. The way he tells it, debt and the dollar are like tectonic plates shifting under our feet, not the instruments of a ruling class holding the world hostage.

The plot is simple and familiar. America has borrowed too much, the dollar is losing its shine, Trump has cut taxes and cursed the gods of fiscal restraint, and Europe—poor, paralyzed Europe—watches helplessly from the sidelines. The story could have been written by any frightened banker in Brussels or Washington: the world is spinning out of control because the political class forgot how to obey the markets. This is the priestly lament of the technocrat—when Mammon’s temple starts shaking, the problem must be the worshippers, never the god.

Colmant turns a structural crisis of capitalism into a personal drama about Trump. In doing so, he pulls the same trick every bourgeois economist does when the system begins to rot—he trades history for personality, class struggle for gossip. The empire’s contradictions are laid at the feet of a single man, as if U.S. debt and dollar supremacy were born in 2016 instead of 1944. Trump becomes both villain and scapegoat, while the real machinery of exploitation hums quietly in the background, unbothered and unnamed.

To make this story believable, Colmant dresses the managers of empire in the robes of reason. Economists, central bankers, and regulators are recast as sober guardians of stability—technocrats in white coats keeping the economy from overheating. They are not agents of capital but neutral doctors treating a fever that nobody caused. This is the same ideological sleight of hand that turns the IMF into a humanitarian institution, or NATO into a peacekeeping force. He calls it “prudential regulation.” We know it as class rule with spreadsheets.

Even the language gives the game away. The dollar isn’t a weapon of global domination—it’s a “pillar” of the financial system, something sacred and architectural, trembling under the weight of uncertainty. The problem isn’t that the United States has used its currency to loot half the world; it’s that the temple may crack, and the parishioners might lose faith. By turning the dollar into scenery, Colmant erases its violence. The whole thing reads like a sermon to the faithful: pray for the dollar, for if it falls, civilization may fall with it.

Europe, meanwhile, is painted as a victim of circumstance, frozen in fear and indecision, watching helplessly as America stumbles into decline. But that’s a convenient fiction. Europe is not some innocent bystander—it’s a full partner in the imperial game. Its banks feast on the same debt markets; its governments back the same wars; its leaders preach austerity while kneeling to the same gods of finance. Colmant’s melancholy Europe is the guilty conscience of the colonizer pretending to be a spectator.

Read closely and you’ll see what’s missing. The column never asks how U.S. debt became the backbone of global empire, or how the dollar became the chain linking every other economy to Washington. It never mentions the wars, the sanctions, the coups, or the sweatshops that keep that system afloat. It doesn’t ask why nations are de-dollarizing, only why they dare. These silences are not accidents—they are the oxygen the argument breathes. Without them, the whole edifice collapses. So we mark those absences and leave them bare. The facts, the context, and the history come next. For now, we recognize this piece for what it is: not analysis, but ideology—a hymn to empire sung in the key of inevitability.

The Hidden Architecture of Crisis: From Debt Fantasies to Financial Empire

The Colmant article gives us a skeleton. It warns that U.S. public debt is spiraling toward 140 percent of GDP, the dollar’s credibility is eroding, de-dollarisation is gathering force, regulatory guardrails are being dismantled, and Europe is helpless before the storm. But as any worker who’s ever heard the steady hum of a machine knows, the real action is in what the blueprint hides.

First, the debt. The global public debt load is already colossal. According to the IMF, it is on course to exceed ninety-three percent of global GDP by 2024 and could threaten one hundred percent near the decade’s end. In 2025 alone, global debt surpassed 324 trillion dollars, with emerging markets carrying a huge share of the burden. The Institute of International Finance warns that this mountain of debt invites the return of the bond vigilante—financial actors betting on defaults, yield spikes, and capital flight. The Bank for International Settlements adds that with rates high, states lose the cushion to respond to shocks. Yet Colmant treats U.S. debt as a unique pathology rather than a feature of a global system that feeds on credit.

These numbers aren’t morality tales—they’re meat. The Monthly Review tradition teaches that monopoly capitalism breeds structural stagnation: surplus capital with nowhere to go but finance. The productive sphere can no longer absorb capital profitably because monopolies choke competition, constrain innovation, and squeeze wages. In response, capital flows into speculation, debt, derivative bets, and rentier claims—what has been called the financialization of accumulation. The U.S. corporate world proves the point: in 2024, corporations poured roughly $942.5 billion into stock buybacks rather than new production, recycling profits to shareholders instead of expanding capacity. That is not an accident; it is how monopoly capital propels itself forward on the fumes of credit.

Colmant mentions deregulation but misses its meaning. Deregulation is the iron gate through which financialization storms into daily life. The repeal of Glass-Steagall through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act freed commercial banks to gamble. Later, the rollback of Dodd-Frank stripped away the last pretense of oversight through key repeals and deregulating measures. These were not small policy tweaks; they were structural enablers of speculative cascades. Without them, the leverage and fragility Colmant laments would not exist in their present form.

Then there’s the dollar. Colmant calls it fragile, its credibility eroding. But the dollar is not just fragile—it is both weapon and anchor of U.S. empire. After Nixon abandoned gold in 1971, the dollar stopped being a claim on real value and became a claim on American power, enforced by guns, sanctions, and coercive banking relationships — Nixon’s 1971 “closing of the gold window” broke dollar convertibility. The system depends on global demand for U.S. Treasuries. In effect, the world’s surplus value is funneled into the Treasury, which recycles it into military operations, debt servicing, and speculation — foreign reserves continue to flow into U.S. Treasury bonds. No one pays a mortgage on this empire—the world buys the IOU. That is imperial rent in its purest form.

Colmant mentions de-dollarisation but avoids explaining why it accelerates. When nations have their reserves seized, they don’t whisper—they act. Russia saw about $300 billion of assets frozen in Western banks; Afghanistan’s reserves were blocked in the U.S. and held at the New York Fed; and the European Union is now debating using the returns on those frozen assets to aid Ukraine. The EU estimates that 210 billion euros of the roughly $300 billion in frozen reserves are held within European jurisdictions. The logic is clear: if your savings can be taken hostage, you build new routes. Hence the rise of BRICS payment systems, bilateral currency deals, and alternative clearing networks. The article calls this a threat; we recognize it as counter-imperial strategy.

He also invokes the erosion of regulation. Those guardrails were never built to protect the public; they were built to contain crises for capital. As financialization deepened, even those limits crumbled. The Federal Reserve now serves as global arbiter of liquidity. Its dollar swap lines to foreign central banks—established as standing arrangements since 2013—are not acts of generosity but imperial triage, deciding who gets oxygen and who suffocates. Colmant admits monetary policy has become political but never admits the politics behind it: the Fed is both lender and enforcer across the circuits of capital.

And Europe is not helpless by fate. Euro area banks hold vast U.S. dollar exposure, with nearly one-fifth of their short-term funding needs denominated in dollars. The European Central Bank itself has warned that this dependence on dollar liquidity exposes banks to U.S. market volatility. In moments of financial stress, Europe’s central banks rely on the Federal Reserve’s dollar swap lines for emergency funding — a mechanism that effectively ties European stability to the decisions of Washington and Wall Street. The ECB’s participation in these permanent swap and repo arrangements confirms that this dependency is institutional, not accidental. Europe’s strategic orientation is thus complicit in dollar supremacy, not victimized by it. Colmant turns dependency into tragedy; in reality, dependency is design.

The omissions are systemic. He ignores the history of how monopoly capital centralizes, how stagnation forces the turn to finance, how speculative bubbles feed each crisis. He refuses to show that debt is not a burden but the bloodstream of empire, that the dollar is a weapon, that de-dollarisation marks a fracture in imperial order, not a panic in the dark. He refuses our world—and in doing so, reveals the real architecture of his own.

Empire in Default: The Political Economy of Imperial Collapse

Strip away the mysticism, and the story Bruno Colmant tells becomes simple: the imperial heart is drowning in its own credit. What he calls an “inevitable” financial crisis is the latest tremor in a system built on stagnation, monopoly, and rent. The engine of U.S. capitalism no longer runs on production—it runs on claims, speculation, and fear. The dollar isn’t the guarantor of stability; it’s the crowbar through which a declining empire pries tribute from the world. The irony is thick: the very financial tools designed to preserve U.S. hegemony now corrode it from within.

From the standpoint of the global working class, this isn’t fate—it’s the bill coming due. The crisis is not “American,” as Colmant frames it; it’s imperial. Since the 1970s, when monopoly capital exhausted its productive frontiers, the United States has lived off the world like a rentier in decline. The productive core of the economy—steel, autos, machinery—was hollowed out, while profits were chased through Wall Street and the war machine. Every dollar printed and every Treasury bond sold is a lien on somebody else’s labor, somewhere else. The empire’s solvency depends on the continued subordination of the Global South.

The Monthly Review economists called this what it is: the stage of monopoly-finance capital. It’s a system where banks, monopolies, and the state fuse into one apparatus of accumulation. When profits dry up in production, the system turns to credit, speculation, and debt peonage. The “financial crisis” isn’t an aberration—it’s how monopoly capital breathes. Each bubble is a desperate gasp for oxygen. Each bailout, a blood transfusion drawn from workers and the colonized.

This also explains the political turn toward authoritarianism. A system that can no longer expand through growth must expand through force. The merger of finance, tech, and the surveillance state—what we call technofascist consolidation—is not a glitch but an adaptation. Digital monopolies like Google, Amazon, and Palantir are not neutral platforms; they are instruments of control in a society that no longer believes its own myths about democracy or progress. Their algorithms don’t just predict markets—they discipline populations. In the age of stagnation, information itself becomes a weapon of class rule.

The dollar’s decline is therefore not a tragedy for “the free world,” but the slow cracking of a global system of looting. De-dollarisation is the monetary expression of liberation—the collective refusal of the Global South to keep underwriting imperial collapse. When BRICS states build new payment systems, or when nations trade in local currencies, they aren’t threatening “stability”; they’re redefining it. Stability, after all, has meant the right of the West to extract, bomb, and dictate without consequence. What Colmant calls “fragmentation” is, for most of humanity, the long-awaited moment when the parasites lose their host.

The European elite’s paralysis, too, is no mystery. Europe tied its fate to the U.S. empire—militarily through NATO, economically through dollar dependence, and ideologically through neoliberal dogma. Its ruling class fears what a post-dollar world would mean: no more imperial rents to cushion social peace, no more cheap credit to finance illusions of stability. The European bourgeoisie isn’t frozen by contradictions—it’s shackled by complicity.

The contradictions Colmant describes are therefore not symptoms of Trumpism or populism—they are the death spasms of a mode of production that long ago exhausted its historical role. Financialization is not a deviation from capitalism; it is capitalism without a frontier. The U.S. empire’s crisis of overaccumulation has reached its planetary limit. The so-called “inevitable” crisis is not the end of history—it’s the end of an illusion: that profit can exist without production, that empire can survive without colonies, that the dollar can rule without trust.

For the global proletariat, this is the hour of clarity. The crash that terrifies the banker is the same crash that opens a breach for the worker and the colonized. The question is not whether the old world will fall—it already is. The question is whether the new one will rise from its ruins with consciousness and organization. The future Colmant fears is the one we must prepare for: a world no longer built on debt, coercion, and rent, but on solidarity, sovereignty, and production for human need.

Turning Collapse into Construction: Building the Front Against Financial Empire

Every empire dies twice—first in its finances, then in its ideas. The dollar is cracking, the myth is fading, and what the ruling class calls “inevitable crisis” is simply the implosion of a system that cannot live without robbery. The question now is not how to stop the fall, but how to organize what rises in its place. For the global working classes, for the colonized nations, for those inside the imperial core who refuse to feed on empire’s spoils—this is our turning point. The task is no longer to predict collapse, but to prepare power.

Across the world, the ground is already moving. The BRICS bloc is constructing a new payments architecture to escape the dollar’s chokehold. Latin America is reviving regional financial sovereignty through projects like Banco del Sur and ALBA Bank. In Africa, movements are calling for a Pan-African monetary system and debt cancellation. In Asia, China and its partners are expanding trade in local currencies and building institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank as shields against Western coercion. None of this is charity; it is the emergence of a new global commons against financial domination. Each act of de-dollarisation is an act of self-defence.

Inside the imperial core, the struggle takes different forms. Workers face layoffs, wage suppression, and collapsing social infrastructure while their governments bail out the same monopolies that caused the crisis. Movements like the Debt Collective, the Jubilee Debt Campaign, and the new wave of union militancy in logistics, education, and tech sectors are already pointing the way forward. The call must be expanded: audit the national debts, expose who profits from them, and refuse to pay for imperial wars with working-class labor and taxes. In Europe, this means breaking NATO’s fiscal stranglehold and linking anti-austerity struggles to anti-imperialist politics. In the United States, it means connecting the fight against Wall Street and Big Tech to the struggles of the colonized and incarcerated within its borders.

Our tactics have to be as global as the system we oppose. The banks and corporations that dominate the planet are networked; so must our resistance be. Build cross-border alliances of workers, peasants, students, and digital organizers. Support alternative media and education platforms that expose financial imperialism and teach political economy from the ground up. Use every tool—co-operative credit unions, community currencies, mutual-aid funds, open-source technologies—to chip away at dependence on capitalist infrastructure. Solidarity today is not a slogan; it is an economic necessity.

Even inside the digital walls of empire, cracks are spreading. The same surveillance platforms that police dissent can be turned into weapons of communication and organization. Proletarian cyber-resistance means mastering the terrain of data, encryption, and counter-propaganda rather than fleeing it. We must occupy the networks as surely as workers once occupied the factories. The future of internationalism will be fought in code as well as in the streets.

What Colmant and his class fear is not simply a financial downturn—it is the emergence of an organized humanity that refuses to live by debt. The collapse of their world is the construction site of ours. Let the financiers call it “fragmentation”; we’ll call it liberation. The task now is to turn every shock into strategy, every rebellion into structure, and every act of defiance into the foundation of a new international order—one rooted not in extraction but in solidarity, not in profit but in life.