You simply couldn't have global production with out the role that finance plays just in this respect, and I'm not even getting into the role that finance plays in terms of venture capital, which was very important in terms of the development of information and technology revolution we just lived through; or the role it plays in terms of facilitating investment. You could do the same for the kind of role that finance plays in terms of making indebted consumers into viable consumers. [....] you can go even further to look at the role that finance plays via channeling workers' savings into pension funds and the role those pension funds play in investing in stock markets, investing in derivatives, and so on, which has to be traced through how that links to production.

[...] You're creating a global capitalism within which the American state and American capital have structural power.

The structural power comes from the fact that that the U.S. is still the dominant country in terms of technology. It's increasingly playing a crucial role in terms of what I raised before--business services, accounting, legal, consulting, engineering, and of course finance. There's more concentration of American power in finance than there is in other sectors. So it's very important not to see imperialism as being only about territorial intervention. And it's very important to understand that this kind of empire grows through actually spreading production, in a sense sharing production globally in a particular way.