More than anything, America now needs “tough love” – a new course that owns up to years of excess. It is not difficult to fathom the broad outlines of what such a new approach might entail, such as more saving, as well as more investment in people and infrastructure. An energy policy might be nice as well, as would more prudent stewardship of the financial system. A program based on these elements would not win any popularity contests. But in the end, it is America’s only hope for sustainable, post-bubble prosperity.
Nor have the financial authorities – the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Department of Treasury – distinguished themselves in this crisis. Ten years ago,
Giubbotto Moncler Uomo, it was a hedge fund (Long Term Capital Management) that was too big to fail. Now these include an investment bank (Bear Stearns) and the country’s twin mortgage behemoths (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). And, courtesy of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, the Fed’s so-called temporary liquidity facility for primary dealers in government securities is now starting to look less and less temporary.
The world’s worsening financial crisis was fed by U.S. consumer excess and Developing Asia’s export model. Have we learned?
Financial Market Implications
The credit crisis is the first stage. Sparked by the sub-prime meltdown that began in summer 2007, a cross-product contagion quickly spread to asset-backed commercial paper, mortgage-backed securities, structured investment vehicles, interbank offshore financing, leveraged lending markets, auction rate securities, so-called monoline insurers, and a number of other opaque products and structures. Unlike the Asian financial crisis of 10 years earlier, which also involved a powerful cross-border contagion, the “originate and distribute” characteristics of the latest complex instruments and structures wound up infecting offshore investors as well. That puts the current crisis in the rarefied breed of being shaped both by cross-product and cross-border viruses.
Tough Lessons
The lessons are painfully similar. When an entire asset class – or for that matter, an economy – goes to excess, the weakest link in the chain often deals a decisive blow to the system as a whole. The bubble analogy works all too well. When the thinnest part of the membrane gives way, the rest of the air quickly escapes.
Taking Stock
That is not the case for non-financials, however. For example, consensus earnings expectations for the non-financials component of the S&P 500 are still centered on prospects of around 20 percent earnings growth through 2007-’08. As U.S. economic growth falters, however, I fully expect earnings risks to tip to the downside for non-financials, underscoring the distinct possibility of yet another important downleg for global equity markets. As a consequence, the bear equity market could well shift from financials to non-financials.
In the end, U.S. consumers had no compunction about tapping their main source of future savings – housing wealth – to fund current consumption. And they went on a record debt binge to pull it off. Household sector indebtedness surged to 133 percent of disposable personal income by year-end 2007, up more than 40 percentage points from the 90 percent debt loads prevailing just a decade earlier. It was the height of folly. Yet the longer it lasted, the more it became deeply ingrained in the American psyche. Now it’s over.
In retrospect, the equity wealth effect was child’s play compared to what the American home market eventually offered. At its peak in mid-2006, net equity extraction from residential property had soared to nearly 9 percent of disposable personal income – fully three times the 3 percent registered only five years earlier. That enabled income-short American consumers not only to ignore the imperatives of income-based saving but also to push consumption up to a record 72 percent of real GDP in 2007. Behind this trend was the confluence of two monstrous bubbles – property and credit – that transformed residential dwellings into the functional equivalent of ATM machines.
Rebalancing Act
If this crisis is anything, it is a wake-up call. For all too long, the United States broke many of the most important rules of conduct for a leading economy. It failed to save. It levered asset bubbles in both equities and homes to sustain unparalleled excess in consumption. It went deeply into debt to sustain that course of action and borrowed heavily from the rest of the world to close the funding gap. Complicity in this binge has been shared by the authorities, especially a central bank that condoned unbridled risk taking and excessive monetary accommodation.
For reasons noted above, the current financial crisis is hardly lacking in superlatives. Whether it is truly the worst debacle since the Great Depression, as many have argued, remains to be seen. But it is certainly a watershed event in many important respects, especially since it draws into sharp question the fundamental underpinnings of a U.S. economy that has long ignored its imbalances and excesses. Sadly, America’s body politic seems neither willing nor able to fathom the magnitude of the problems that have come to a head in this crisis. That’s true whether one considers tax policy, the housing “fix,” or financial system management.
This should prove to be a very challenging outcome for the rest of the world, especially for those developing nations that derived so much of their economic sustenance from exporting goods to over-extended American consumers. Their task is essentially the opposite of what the United States faces. Export-led developing economies must shift the mix of growth toward domestic demand, especially private consumption. That won’t be easy for nations who have relied on cheap currencies, surplus saving and infrastructure strategies as the principal means to achieve spectacular progress on the road to economic development. But with their major export market – the United States – now under pressure, and with little consumption offset likely elsewhere in the world, the developing world has little choice than to embark on a consumer-led rebalancing of its own. This probably means slower economic growth in the developing world for the next several years, with the 7.3 percent average annual growth pace of past years conceivably slowing into the 5 percent vicinity over the next two to three years.
Never mind a seemingly chronic shortfall of income generation, with real disposable personal income growth averaging just 3.2 percent over the same period. American consumers no longer felt they had to save the old-fashioned way; they drew down income-based saving rates to zero for the first time since the Great Depression. And why not? After all, they had uncovered the alchemy of a new asset-based saving strategy: first out of equities in the latter half of the 1990s, and then out of housing in the first half of the current decade. Lax regulatory and supervisory oversight, in conjunction with excessive monetary accommodation, resulted in an explosion of free and easy credit, which turned out to be the icing on a toxic cake.
U.S. financial institutions generally have been aggressive in marking down the value of distressed securities. And the markets have been brutal in penalizing those financial institutions that eventually were most exposed to America’s post-bubble carnage – especially Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. Largely for those reasons, I believe this first phase is about 65 percent complete. More is behind us than ahead of us, but there is still a good deal more to come as the business cycle now kicks in and produces yet another round of earnings impairments for financial intermediaries.
The second stage reflects the impacts of the credit and housing implosions on the real side of the U.S. economy. Thus far, those impacts have largely been concentrated in residential construction activity. As noted above, however, the main event in this phase of the adjustment is the likely capitulation of the overextended, low-saving, excessively indebted U.S. consumer. For nearly a decade and a half, real consumption growth averaged close to 4 percent per year. As consumers now move to rebuild income based saving and prune debt burdens, a multiyear downshift in consumer demand is likely. Over the next two to three years, I expect trend consumption growth rates to be cut in half to around 2 percent.
Washington’s response to the housing crisis is equally problematic. Congress is determined to make foreclosure containment a key aspect of any fix; new legislation provides government guarantees for up to US$ 300 billion in home mortgage refinancing packages for low-income families. This is consistent with a philosophy that has long stressed ever-rising rates of homeownership as a key objective of U.S. public policy. Yet truth be known, an obvious and painful lesson of the subprime crisis is that there are some Americans who simply cannot afford to buy a home.
In the Beginning
Can the world learn the tough lessons of this upheaval? The United States and China are likely to hold the keys to the answer.
It didn’t have to be this way. America went too far, and an export-dependent world was more than happy to go along for the ride. Policy makers and regulators – stewards of the global economy – looked the other way and allowed the system to veer out of control. Investors, business people, financial institutions and consumers were all active participants in this Era of Excess.
Tax policy is a case a point. Rebates to overextended American consumers have been the first line of defense, and there is new talk in Washington of a second round of such a stimulus measure. Yet with personal consumer spending hitting a record 72 percent of real GDP in 2007, the government’s contributions to disposable income are aimed at perpetuating the biggest consumption binge in modern history. For a nation that desperately needs to save more and spend less – and thereby pay down debt and reduce its massive current account deficit – politically expedient personal tax cuts are the wrong medicine at the wrong time.
No economy can live beyond its means in perpetuity. Yet like others that have tried to do so in the past, the United States thought it was different. America’s current account deficit surged to 6 percent of GDP in 2006 from 1.5 percent in 1995. When its annual deficit reached a peak US$ 844 billion in the third quarter 2006, the United States required US$ 3.4 billion in capital inflows from abroad each business day to fund its massive shortfall in domestic savings.
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But the imagery misses one critical point. The progression of market bubbles is an insidious process. From equities to property to credit, the bubbles have expanded in scope and risk. A bubble-prone U.S. economy became a breeding ground for a gathering storm of systemic risks in America and in our increasingly interdependent world economy. Now we are left to pick up the pieces.
This crisis is a strong signal of strategies that are not sustainable. They led to multiple layers of excess, underscored by a precarious interplay between internal and external imbalances within and between the world’s largest economies. It took unsustainable credit and risk bubbles to hold this system together in an unstable equilibrium. But now the bubbles have burst, unmasking a worrisome disequilibrium that demands a new approach to policy and an important shift in behavior by households, businesses and financial market participants.
While seemingly made in America, the era of excess was truly global in scope. The U.S. consumption binge was fodder to export-led economies elsewhere in the world. That was especially the case in Developing Asia – the fastest growing major region in the world since the turn of the century. Large enough to account for fully 20 percent of total world output (as measured on a purchasing power parity basis), real GDP growth in Developing Asia averaged 8 percent over the 2000-’07 period – more than two and a half times the 3 percent growth trend elsewhere in the world over the same period. In search of rapid growth to achieve its development and poverty reduction objectives, Developing Asia viewed America’s consumption binge as “manna from heaven.” Consumption deficient Japan had a similar response, as did the region’s large and newly industrialized economies such as Taiwan and Korea.
China and Japan are at opposite ends of Asia’s external vulnerability chain. China has a huge cushion after solid growth over the past two years to ward off the blow of an external shock. Japan, by contrast, has been only a 2 percent growth economy in recent years and has no such cushion. In a weaker external demand climate, the downside to Chinese economic growth appears to be around 8 percent. For Japan, the downside is probably closer to zero, underscoring the distinct possibility of a recessionary relapse in the region’s largest economy.
In short, this macroeconomic crisis is far from over. The main reason is that the bubbles that have burst – property and credit – became so big they ended up infecting the real side of the U.S. economy. And as the United States now adjusts to much tougher post-bubble realities, the rest of the interdependent, globalized world can be expected to follow. Moreover, there are undoubtedly feedback effects between the various stages – especially as the business cycle now starts to bear down on financial institutions that were initially buffeted by the credit contagion. A new round of earnings pressures on banks and other lending institutions could exacerbate the credit crunch further, reinforcing the cyclical pressures on debt-dependent economies in the United States and around the world. As a result, macroeconomic adjustments should last well into 2009 and possibly spill over into 2010.
Perpetuating the Madness?
There will be quarters when consumer spending falls short of that bogey and the U.S. economy lapses into a recessionary state. There will undoubtedly be quarters when consumption growth is faster than the 2 percent norm, and it will appear that a recovery is under way. Such rebounds, unfortunately, can be expected to prove short-lived for post-bubble American consumers. This aspect of the macro-adjustment scenario has only begun. As a result, in my view, the second phase is only about 20 percent complete.
If all the authorities can do is opt for politically expedient fixes -- such as tax rebates for overextended American consumers, lax monetary and currency policies for inflation prone developing economies, and the creation of more asset bubbles – the world will have squandered a critical opportunity to put its house in order. That would be the greatest tragedy of all.
The early verdict on such a new approach is not encouraging. That’s especially the case in the United States and China, which are two key players for today’s globalization. As noted, Washington is reverting to timeworn recipes that perpetuate the excess consumption and moral hazard problems of the past decade. And by cutting policy interest rates on September 15, Beijing has sent new pro-growth signals – an especially disconcerting development in light of China’s ongoing problems on the inflation front. The body politic in each nation is clinging steadfastly to its core values, claiming that rapid economic growth is the antidote to any and all problems. Concerns regarding the sustainability of that growth are being deferred to “another day.”
Anything is possible, but I have my doubts about a U.S. export renaissance, especially in the aftermath of a decades-long hollowing of America’s manufacturing and export base. Jobs and industries that were “lost forever” do not spring back to life overnight. The United States, in my view, will now have to come to grips with a much slower growth trajectory, with real GDP growth likely to slow from the 3.2 percent trend of the past 13 years to no higher than 2 percent over the next two to three years, or longer.
A voracious appetite for economic growth lies at the heart of the boom that has now gone bust. An income-short U.S. economy rejected a slower pace of domestic demand. It turned, instead, to an asset- and debt-financed growth binge that had little to do with the time-honored underpinnings of income generation forthcoming from current production. For the developing world, rapid growth was a powerful antidote to a legacy of wrenching poverty. And the hyper-growth that was realized in regions like Developing Asia became the end that justified all means, including the negative externalities of inflation, pollution, environmental degradation, widening income disparities, and periodic asset bubbles. The world’s body politic wanted – and still wants – growth at all costs. But now the bill is coming due as the global economy faces a multi-year rebalancing, and reins in its appetite.
By Stephen S. Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia
For the longest time, such funding was there for the asking. There were plenty of new theories concocted to rationalize why the unsustainable might actually be sustainable. Foreign lending with impunity was a special privilege that fell to the nation possessing the world’s reserve currency, many argued. Some went further, celebrating the advent of a new, Bretton Woods II arrangement, whereby surplus savers such as China could forever recycle excess dollars into U.S. assets to keep their currencies competitive and their export-led growth models thriving. In the end, of course, these “new paradigm” explanations – like those of the past – failed the test of time and the markets.
For bonds, the prognosis centers on the interplay between inflation and growth risks – and the implications of such a tradeoff for the policy stances of central banks. As inflation fears mounted recently, yields on sovereign government bonds rose while market participants started discounting a return to more aggressive monetary policies among major central banks. In a faltering growth climate, however, I suspect cyclical inflation fears will end up being overblown and monetary authorities, fearing overkill,
Giubbotto Moncler Donna, will turn skittish. Over the near term, that leads me to conclude that major bond markets could rally somewhat further on the heels of a rethinking of the aggressive central bank tightening scenario. Over the medium term – namely, looking through the cycle – I concede that the jury is still out on stagflation risks, especially in inflation-prone developing economies. The bond market prognosis is more uncertain beyond that time horizon.
Such global rebalancing arises from an unprecedented disparity that opened over the past several years between nations with current account deficits and those with surpluses. By the International Monetary Fund’s reckoning, the absolute sum of current account balances hit a record of nearly 6 percent of global GDP in 2006-’07 – fully three times the 2 percent share prevailing in the mid-1990s. Apologists went seriously wrong, in my view, not by finding new ways to rationalize unprecedented external imbalances, but in failing to appreciate the impact of asset and credit bubbles in spawning these excesses. Now that those bubbles have burst, global rebalancing has become an urgent task in a lopsided world. And the global economy will undoubtedly pay a steep price for this long period of neglect by moving toward a much slower growth trajectory in the years immediately ahead.
At the root of the problem was America’s audacious shift from income- to asset-based saving. The U.S. consumer led the charge, with trend growth in consumer demand hitting 3.5 percent per annum in real terms over 14 years, from 1994 to 2007. It was the greatest buying binge over such a protracted period for any economy in modern history.
The commodity market outlook is especially topical these days. A year from now, I believe economically sensitive commodity prices such as oil, base metals and other industrial materials will be a good deal lower than today. Soft commodities, mainly agricultural products,
Piumini Moncler, as well as precious metals could well be exceptions to that outcome. Two reasons underpin the case for a correction for economically sensitive hard commodities: a marked deceleration in global growth leading to a related improvement in the supply-demand imbalance; and a pullback in commodity buying by return-seeking investors. This second impetus to the commodity bubble cannot be underestimated, in my opinion. I am not sympathetic to the view that hedge funds and other speculators have driven commodity markets to excess. At work, instead, are mainly long-term, real money institutional investors such as global pension funds, all of whom have been advised by consultants to increase their asset allocations in commodities as an asset class. Such herding behavior by institutional investors invariably turns out wrong. I expect that to be the case this time as well – and the trend appears to be under way.
Yet there can be no mistaking the high-octane fuel that drove the Asian growth boom – an increasingly powerful,
moncler quincy pas cher, export-led growth dynamic. For Developing Asia as a whole, exports in 2007 hit a record of more than 45 percent of pan-regional GDP – up more than 10 percentage points from the share prevailing in the mid-1990s. That left the world’s fastest growing region more dependent on external demand than ever before. And with the American consumer in trouble, Asia’s export-led growth dynamic is now at risk.
For currencies, the dollar remains at center stage. I have been a dollar bear for more than six years for one reason: America’s massive current account deficit. Although the U.S. external shortfall has been reduced somewhat over the past year and a half – largely for cyclical reasons – to 5 percent of GDP, it is still far too large. So I remain fundamentally bearish on the dollar. At the same time,
doudoune moncler pas cher, it appears the dollar overshot on the downside during the first 12 months of the subprime crisis largely on the basis that subprime was mainly a U.S. problem. As the global repercussions of the macroeconomic crisis spread, I believe investors will rethink the belief that they can seek refuge in euro- and yen-denominated assets. That rethinking has already begun, prompting a significant rally for the dollar in recent weeks that could well continue through end of 2008. Once a more synchronous global growth outcome is built into the relative price structure of foreign exchange rates, I suspect the dollar will resume its decline in early 2009 due to America’s still oversized current account deficit.
This likely downturn in the global business cycle has not occurred in a vacuum. It has been accompanied by an unprecedented outbreak of credit market contagion that has wreaked havoc throughout the world’s financial markets. But understanding the three stages of interplay between financial markets and the real economy is a key to forecasting the global macroeconomic outlook for the next few years.
Alas, the global business cycle has turned. World GDP growth, which averaged close to 5 percent annually over the 2004-’07 period – the strongest four consecutive years of global growth since the early 1970s – now seems headed back down into the 3.5 percent range for a couple of years. While that is hardly a disastrous outcome, it does represent a 30 percent deceleration in the growth rate compared with the previous four years.
How wrong this logic was – in 2000 and, again, just a year ago. Eight and a half years ago, the bursting of the dotcom bubble was, in fact, followed by a 49 percent decline in the broader S&P 500 index over the next two and a half years. And the bursting of the subprime bubble a year ago has triggered an unprecedented contagion throughout the broader credit and capital markets, toppling many of the once proud icons of American finance – first Bear Stearns, and now Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.
Japan is also highly vulnerable to external demand shock. Overall Japanese export volume growth went into negative territory in June (down 1.6 percent year-on-year) for the first time in 16 months. At work in this case was emerging sluggishness in Japanese exports to Europe and elsewhere in Asia, which were once resilient markets that previously masked the emerging weakness in the United States. Largely as a result, the Japanese economy contracted at a 3 percent annual rate in the second quarter 2008 – the sharpest decline in seven years.
Denial, one of the most powerful human emotions, once again had the upper hand. The broad consensus of consumers, business people, policy makers and politicians ignored simmering problems on the subprime front, and believed that the global boom of the preceding four years was very much intact.
The argument a year ago was laced with a painful sense of déjà vu. At the end of 1999,
giubbotti moncler, dotcom accounted for only six percent of the market capitalization of U.S. equities. A powerful, flexible and innovative U.S. economy was believed to offer built-in resilience and ongoing support to the other 94 percent of the U.S. equity market and the macroeconomy. A year ago, subprime accounted for only 14 percent of total, securitized mortgage debt outstanding. A still powerful, flexible and innovative U.S. economy was once again believed to offer ongoing support to the other 86 percent of the mortgage market and the broader economy.
In short, Washington has responded to this financial crisis with a politically driven, reactive approach. Policy initiatives have been framed more by circumstances of the moment than by strategic assessments of what it truly takes to put the U.S. economy back on a more sustainable path. By perpetuating excessive consumption, low saving rates, unrealistic goals of home ownership and moral hazards in financial markets, this patchwork approach includes the worst of flaws: It does little to change bad behavior. Far from heeding the tough lessons of an economy in crisis,
moncler quincy pas cher, Washington now is doing little to break the daisy chain of excess that got America in this mess in the first place.
The events of the past year have certainly not been lost on financial markets. As forward-looking discounting mechanisms, much of the macroeconomic adjustments that unfolded are now “in the price” of major asset classes. But there remains deep denial about the full extent of the adjustments. To the extent that there is more trouble to come for the global economy, the same can be said for the broad classes of financial assets: equities, bonds, currencies and commodities.
The third stage is a global phase – underscored by the linkages between U.S. consumers and the rest of the world. As noted, those linkages are only now just beginning to play out. Ordering and cross-border shipping lags suggest this phase of the adjustment will take a good deal of time to unfold. Early impacts are already evident in China and Japan, largely on the basis of U.S.-led export adjustments. With ripple effects now only beginning to show up in Europe, these cross-border impacts should gather in force over the months and quarters to come. That suggests to me that Phase III is only about 10 percent complete.
Foreclosure is a tragic, but ultimately necessary, consequence of misguided home buying. For low-income victims of the housing bubble, assistance should be directed at income support rather than at perpetuating uneconomic homeownership. By opting for the latter, Congress is inhibiting the requisite decline in home prices that ultimately will be necessary to clear the market and bring the housing crisis to an end.
Financial and economic crises often define history’s greatest turning points. Though painful, they can be the ultimate learning experiences. But there can be no denying the urgent need to learn from these lessons and address the systemic risks that led to the crisis. Such heavy lifting rarely sits well with the body politic. A path of least resistance is invariably selected, leading to more of a knee-jerk response; a quick fix that tempers immediate dislocations but does little to tackle deep-rooted systemic problems.
China is undoubtedly a key player in that regard. After posting nearly 12 percent GDP growth in the years 2006 and ’07,
Moncler outlet, Chinese growth slowed to 10.1 percent in the second quarter 2008. That downshift was largely the result of a marked deceleration in the growth of Chinese exports to the United States – up 8 percent year-on-year in June 2008 following average annual gains of more than 25 percent over the 2003-’07 period. Significantly, the U.S.-centric compression of Chinese export and GDP growth – hitting about 20 percent of China’s total external demand – was accompanied by ongoing vigor in China’s shipments to Europe (up 25 percent in June 2008) and Japan (up 22 percent). However, as Japan and Europe are now weakening, the heretofore resilient areas for Chinese external demand – collectively accounting for about 30 percent of China’s total exports – also will begin to falter. With lags, that could well prompt another downleg in Chinese GDP growth to 8 percent from 10 percent within the next six to nine months.
With equity markets now in bear market territory in most of the world, it is tempting to conclude that the worst is over. I am suspicious about that prognosis. The trick, in my view, is to resist the temptation to view equity markets as a homogenous asset class. Instead, it is important to make a distinction between financials and non-financials. The former certainly have been beaten down. While the adjustments of Phases II and III undoubtedly will put more cyclical pressure on the earnings of financial institutions, share prices for this bruised and battered sector of the economy may now be moving into overshoot territory.
A year ago, we had barely an inkling of what would transpire in the world’s financial markets and the global economy. There were some early warning signs that all was not well in the subprime slice of the U.S. mortgage market. But, as we saw with the dotcom bubble in early 2000, subprime was widely considered of little consequence for the macroeconomic story.
A key question going forward is whether an adaptive and increasingly interrelated global system will learn the tough lessons of this macroeconomic upheaval. At the heart of this self-appraisal must be greater awareness of the consequences of striving for open-ended economic growth. The United States couldn’t hit its growth target the old fashioned way by relying on internal income generation, so it turned to a new asset- and debt-dependent growth model. Export dependent Developing Asia took its saving-led growth model to excess. Unwilling or unable to stimulate internal private consumption at home, surplus capital was recycled into infrastructure and dollar-based assets which, in effect, forced super-competitive currencies and exports to become the sustenance of a new development recipe.
The Asia Connection
For the United States, this rebalancing will mean a sustained deceleration in personal consumption growth, as households abandon newfound asset-dependent saving and consumption strategies in favor of the income-led fundamentals of the past. Hope springs eternal that a weaker dollar will enable America to finesse this transition without skipping a beat; that consumer-led growth will now give way to currency-led export growth.
The global boom of 2002 to mid-’07 was an outgrowth of the powerful cross-border linkages of globalization. No region of the world benefited more from this connectedness than export-led Asia. That has been especially the case in the region’s high-flying developing economies, dominated by China. Decoupling – the supposed untethering of developing economies from the developed world – is antithetical to the linkages that have become central to the powerful globalization trends of the past five years. These linkages are just as intact on the downside as on the upside of the global business cycle. And through well-developed, cross-border feedback mechanisms, the responses to a major weakening in U.S. demand by Asia’s export-led economies are now triggering powerful repercussions across markets and economies in an interdependent world.
Undisciplined risk taking was a central element of the bubbles that spawned this crisis. By tempering the consequences of the bursting of the risk bubble, authorities are shielding irresponsible risk takers and thereby enabling a “moral hazard” that has become increasingly ingrained in today’s financial culture. At the same time, a Federal Reserve that continues to ignore the perils of asset bubbles in the setting of monetary policy is equally guilty of reckless endangerment to the financial markets and to an increasingly asset-dependent U.S. economy.
The longer the United States sustained the unsustainable, the more it believed in the perpetuity of its charmed existence. The real message of this crisis is that this game is now over. But steeped in denial and feeling the heat of voters in a politically charged presidential election year, Washington’s politicians insist the game can go on.
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For all these reasons
as well as Rio Tinto's shareholders.
such as excessive noise and feces
UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 6 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said here Wednesday that "Afghanistan will remain one of our main priorities in 2010," and the relations between Afghanistan and its international partners "must be reevaluated."
the downside is probably closer to zero
Hybrid Mode
