Stop reading right here and declare a huge bias in opinion piece, because this is not reporting.
Stock market, after months of declining because of expectations of war with Iraq, took off immediately after Operation Iraqi Freedom started and haven't yet looked back, though market at its record highs looks overextended. Obviously, whatever jitters there are in the market, they are absolutely not due to Iraq.
There is no mortgage crisis, anybody who wants to can get a loan, but many wait for a huge housing bubble (mostly in 5 states) to settle down and prices to come down before buying and that created a problem for few banks involved in poor lending practices, and some real estate companies, home builders and mortgage lending shops who now see a steep decline in business. This is cyclical and predictable, and though painful for these industries, is not a mortgage crisis.
Huge budget and trade deficits have been with us for a long time, and while need attending by limiting spending and bad legislations that make us less competitive with other countries (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley, minimum wage raise, various states' global warming initiatives, higher taxes, corn ethanol initiatives, not passing oil and gas production in ANWR and coastal areas, etc.) those same countries have similar problems, some due to particularly relatively strong euro / currency.
We may have started to see declining growth in productivity recently after years of high growth of productivity, but it's still a growth, and some of it is due to the same bad legislations mentioned above, yet the productivity in Europe is nowhere near ours. There was an article recently in WSJ that Mexicans working in USA are 5 times more productive than same workers doing the same kind of work in Mexico.
And, finally, why would "investors" worry about state of economy, when they can invest in so many places around the globe, or even bet / "invest" against the economy or dollar through different instruments including various derivatives. Some of hedge funds went bust recently, while some others made money off of their loss. Investment opportunity is generally divorced from state or direction of the economy, and the economy (strangely) is still quite healthy so far, even with all the attempts by Democrats to kill it in time for 2008 election.
Author is either completely incompetent in financial and economic matters, or is completely biased and issues his opinions in place of reporting, or is both incompetent and biased. Case closed.
The facts in the article are true. The European economy is doing fine in the moment although we still face some big problems of course. Nevertheless the propaganda bubble about the sure downfall of Europe is complete BS. Neither America nor Europe will vanish into thin air, but both are facing major changes.
Thanks for your additional comments. Some of the articles being publish today, are very poorly written. I do think there might be some room for some reasoned concerns, but this guy is so over the top that the paper should have to declare this article a contribution to the democrat party.