Isn't it interesting how, even before Obama won, we didn't hear nearly the amount of America-bashing as usual since the financial crisis hit?
The rest of the world wanted us to get kneed in the groin financially--they figured they could deal with China, India, South America, after taking something of a hit.
Well, we got kneed, and are being kneed again and again, but we're still standing, and those in our shadow are getting a lot of the fallout. And they're starting to mewl about how the big, bad US has ALWAYS been their friend, and we'll help them out in this crisis, right, right?
And they’re starting to mewl about how the big, bad US has ALWAYS been their friend, and we’ll help them out in this crisis, right, right?
rest of the world will need to get inline for handouts.
Probably will be nothing left after Obama fullfils all his campaign promises
So painful have been the global aftershocks of the credit crunch that French president Nicolas Sarkozy has called for nothing less than a new Bretton Woods Agreement, the 1944 meeting which led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund and other global institutions.
British prime minister Gordon Brown has talked of this being a “decisive moment for the world economy”. Across the world, government intervention is back in fashion: European governments have so far committed over €2 trillion in cash injections, bank deposit guarantees, inter-bank loan coverage and partial or full nationalisations. Last week there was agreement to more than double the EU’s own crisis fund to €25 billion.
The US can cope with this fiscal shock in a way that the European Union simply can’t,” says Ferguson, author of The Ascent of Money, and holder of senior academic positions at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford universities. “The current crisis is the biggest test of European economic unity ever.”
The United States, he says, has a single unitary fiscal system that can support a substantial increase in public borrowing in the form of finance payouts, costing trillions of dollars. “The European Union only has a partially unitary monetary system - the euro - and no unitary fiscal system worth talking about. So what we’ve seen, and Ireland led the way, has been a series of individual actions by governments trying to prop up their banks.”