Blame America, Economic Meltdown Started Overseas
Hm, maybe if I would have cared I would have noticed.
One problem with this blame-game is that last year’s recession was much deeper in many European and Asian countries than it was in the United States.
By the fourth quarter of 2008, as the nearby table shows, real US gross domestic product was just 0.8 percent smaller than it had been a year earlier. The contraction was twice as deep in Germany and Britain and much worse in Japan and Sweden.
In February, US industrial production was 11.8 percent lower than a year before—while Singapore was down by 22.4 percent, Sweden by 22.9 percent and Japan by 38.4 percent.
What was the mechanism by which US problems were supposedly spread to other countries? It wasn’t international trade. The dollar value of US imports didn’t start to fall until August 2008, and imports of consumer goods didn’t fall until September—many months after Japan and Europe fell into recession.
Indeed, most of the economies that fell first and fastest were not heavily dependent on exports to the United States.
I have to be honest that I don’t follow economic matters in other countries very much. By that I mean I don’t follow them at all.
But this does make a lot of sense. One thing that’s bothered me all along is that if the problem stemmed from our financial system, then why did the US dollar climb in value against most major currencies last fall when all of this happened?
This wouldn’t excuse the weaknesses that were put into the US economy by the government meddling in the home loan market to fulfill some’s wishes for a society that we don’t have. That’s causing the US public a lot of problems now that the inevitable bubble burst.
