When everyone looks astonished at the American failures (and no, it cannot be said that the Munich Summit was a success for Biden) both in the economic (na hallucinating poverty together with a concentration of wealth never had before) and social ( the country is on the verge of a civil war), everyone wonders why this happened, and why so fast.

An empire stops so abruptly only in one situation: when suddenly the source of its wealth, or at least one of the sources, breaks. For example: Rome did not buy wheat. The grain was collected as a tax that other parts of the empire had to pay. Consequently, the price of wheat in Rome (and consequently of flour) was the only cost of logistics.

At a certain point the Vandals arrive, pass the Pillars of Hercules, upset the north of Africa and stop where Carthage used to be . The problem with this phenomenon is that North Africa at that point stops paying taxes in grain. And since most of the wheat until that moment came from there, a gigantic increase in the price of wheat depopulated the city for hunger, and makes it unprofitable to feed a multitude of slaves.

But beware: this did not make the upper classes of Rome poorer, quite the contrary. They were the owners of the few wheat crops in Italy, the ones that were more "secure" as sources of supply. What happened is that the Roman population dropped dramatically in number.

This was a real coup de grace for Rome, which was already struggling to remain a power for other reasons. The extraction of wealth had stopped.

The extraction of wealth is that phenomenon for which a military power manages, with its military hegemony, to get what it needs at a price much lower than what it should pay according to a market logic.

Let's take an example: Saudi Arabia. It is a country that has lived for decades mainly selling oil. The US was a historical "ally", except that without the extraction of oil the Wahhabi dynasty would have died out: but they did not have the technologies to extract it, and they did not have the military technologies to defend it. Not for nothing when Saddami invaded Kuwait, fears were that he could do the same with the Saudis.

"Power" arrives and says: "Now I save your ass, and then I also bring you new technologies to extract oil. In return, you sell it to me at a certain price ”.

That is a very low price: in a "normal" market condition, given the importance that oil had for the West IN THAT PERIOD, its price could easily have been a thousand dollars a barrel. Clearly now that there is overproduction and the Russians are selling their oil, the price is low due to the overabundant supply. Oil is an example of "wealth extraction".

Another example is Facebook. It extracts something similar to oil but less smelly, which is the data. How much is the data worth?

We can do a quick calculation by taking 2017 online advertising revenues in the United States (about 83 billion dollars) and dividing them by active Internet users in the USA (about 287 million): in this case the "market value" of the user. average is around $ 289.19 per year.

Imagine that the Saudi regime starts giving $ 83 billion in oil to the US, and you get a picture of what it means to "extract the data".

This happens continuously and in many situations: for example, American IT multinationals (Cisco, Juniper, etc) do not sell at low prices. They benefit from the fact that the US has the power to ban a competitor (Huawei) that had already lowered costs by 40% to make its way into the market.

When, for no specific technological reason, we agree to throw Huawei away to use (much more expensive) American products, the US is once again "extracting wealth" from European consumers. And they are doing so by harnessing their political and military influence.

The US has accumulated immense wealth as empires always have: extracting wealth.

And why are they starting to struggle? Because the wealth extraction mechanism is breaking down, and in some places it is already broken.

If we think of the events that lead FB to quarrel with the Australian government, we discover that it is a question of extracting wealth: Facebook took the contents of Australian newspapers for free in order to make its platform more interesting. And as if that were not enough, on likes and shares and comments he could base a user profiling that made the database even more interesting. When the Ustralian government decided to block the extraction of wealth produced by its media industry, the result was… a furious reaction from Facebook. Google, surprisingly, agreed to pay.

What is happening is that more and more governments are preventing the US from extracting some kind of wealth. In Africa, many governments have preferred to have the Chinese extract their wealth. Europe has been raising the value of the products it exports for 4 decades now, from Italian food to luxury cars, and for everything we export, to the point where the market price has become… fair. Completely unbalancing the American trade balance. China itself no longer allows its wealth to be extracted from the internet, and has actually begun (TikTok docet) to extract American wealth.

But geopolitical power has other advantages as well. If Airbus did not exist and Chinese products did not exist, those who buy Boeing would (as they did before) turn a blind eye to the defects of Boeing aircraft. As it was done before. The political and military power of the USA made sure that a mediocre and dangerous product was sold as if it were excellence. Disaster occurred when, with the loss of political and military power, the rest of the world (possessing one or more alternatives) was able to say that no, Boeing's planes are not so safe. Just forty years ago, news of a disaster caused by a Boeing construction flaw wouldn't even make it to the pages of the newspapers .

This is the US problem. The same that Rome had when the vandals invaded North Africa: the prices of essential goods become those of the market, and only a few can access the goods.

And so we have a nation where decent quality food costs too much and poor quality food is eaten made with excesses and collateral products, which are disposed of by drowning them in food (6 grams of sugar in a slice of bread, against 0.99 g in Europe), we find that the preferred brand for everything in the US is "cheapo", meaning that they are buying the cheapest version of everything. This produces a huge disparity in wealth among the population, and so on. But none of these phenomena are new: they are the same phenomena that were seen in Rome when the price of wheat was brutally aligned with the market.

For this reason, anyone who deceives himself that Biden can put things right is delusional. By now the decline has begun, and is in a very advanced stage.

If you notice, in the last two years the investments of Apple, Amazon & co in European countries have increased. BUT this is not good. It just means that Europe is the only continent that still lets itself be drilled without asking for a piece of the pie, as if Saudi Arabia had let foreigners take away the oil for free.

As soon as the EU raises the price….

The free grain will run out.