January 23, 2008

Who suckered who is the wrong debate

Sir George Soros writing about “The worst market crisis in 60 years” January 23, is right to say that resulting political tensions…may disrupt the global economy and plunge the world into recession or worse. Unfortunately he then adds coal to that fire when he speaks with venom about how “Globalization allowed the US to suck up the savings of the rest of the world”, knowing perfectly well this was mostly because of the immense reserve accumulations of dollars voluntarily made by governments, mostly to keep exchange rates artificially low in order to, in Soros phraseology, suck up jobs. Who suckered who is not the debate the world now needs.

That the US should have ignored the financing offers they received from the world and behaved with more discipline not one doubts, but neither would then other countries have been able to strengthen so much so that they now can perhaps take over some of the pulling responsibilities of a bit tired US economic locomotive. How that can best be done is what we should be debating.