Frightening coincidence

Today James Wolcott writes this (quoting economist Stephen Roach) about America's mounting international debt and fuck-you attitude toward its creditors:

"From Beijing to Dubai, there is a growing undercurrent of economic anti-Americanism. The irony of it all is truly extraordinary: The US has the greatest external deficit in the history of the world, and is now sending increasingly negative signals to two of its most generous providers of foreign capital -- China and the Middle East. The United States has been extraordinarily lucky to finance its massive current account deficit on extremely attractive terms. If its lenders now start to push back, those terms could change quickly -- with adverse consequences for the dollar, real long-term US interest rates, and overly indebted American consumers. The slope is getting slipperier, and Washington could care less."

Also today, I read this, from William shirer's seminal "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:"

Between 1924 and 1930 German borrowing amounted to some seven billion dollars [a lot of money back then] and most of it came from American investors, who gave little thought to how the Germans might make eventual repayment. The Germans gave even less thought to it.

After Alito's confirmation, I began wading through Shirer's book, and I've kept at it on and off. There is plenty there to scare the pants off any contemporary reader. This point is actually the least of it, but I wanted to call attention to the tie-in.