Even back in the 1920s, far-sighted IG Farben had been worried about Peak Oil, and had developed the Fischer-Tropsch process to make oil from coal. Unfortunately, Fischer-Tropsch oil was not competitive with imported oil, so IG Farben needed a protectionist government to get a return on their R&D investment.
]]>From then on, the United States ran ever-larger trade deficits, seeking a new kind of hegemony through being the "consumer of first resort". The anti-worker policies were a way to boost profits, in order to encourage the influx of foreign capital into Wall Street that was required to fund the twin deficits.
The high US interest rates that were part of this policy also caused the Third World debt crisis, and forced the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe to impose brutal austerity measures on their people (thus hastening their demise).
Another aspect of US policy in the '70s was to force up oil prices (it wasn't the work of uppity Arabs -- US allies such as the Shah of Iran co-operated in the increases). The thinking behind this is that while it would hurt the US economy, it would hurt the economies of America's competitors more, as those countries were (at the time) far more dependent on imported oil than the United States itself.
For more information on the history of the global economy from Bretton Woods to the Crash of 2008, check out Yanis Varoufakis's the Global Minotaur.
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