单选题
Over the past few days, the U.S. has been in the world"s crosshairs. Political argument in Washington produced a debt agreement widely criticized as insufficient and incomplete. Standard & Poor"s downgraded America"s credit rating, raising concerns about the health of the world"s most important economy. Slow growth in the U.S. is threatening the entire global recovery. Stock-market turmoil on Wall Street has turned markets from London to Seoul into roller coasters.
Yes, the U.S. has been a source of much uncertainty in recent days. But in my opinion, the real danger for the global economy lies elsewhere: in Europe. If we"re going to have another financial crisis, chances are it will start in the euro zone, not Washington.
On a macro level, you could say the U.S. is worse off economically than Europe right now. Economists were frantically reducing their 2011 growth forecasts for the U.S. as its GDP limped along in the first half of the year. In Europe, growth is holding up. The IMF raised its growth projection for the euro zone in late June to 2%. And as a recent HSBC report noted, the state of American national finances is actually more feeble than the euro zone"s taken as a whole.
Even before the financial crisis, the U.S. fiscal path was unsustainable, an ageing population combined with extravagant social security commitments suggested either the need for massive tax increases or dramatic spending cuts. The crisis, however, made matters a lot worse. According to the OECD, the US federal, state and local government deficit (NOT the federal deficit alone) jumped from 2.9% of GDP in 2007 to 10.6% in 2010.
Though that may be true, the U.S. has one huge advantage over Europe at this moment, the luxury of time. Ironically, the reaction of the world"s investor community to the recent financial turmoil has been to rush into U.S. debt—yes, the very bonds downgraded by S&P. What that means is U.S. borrowing costs will continue to decline, and that buys Washington time to get its act together and put in place a real plan to fill the deficit and restore American growth. The euro zone, on the other hand, has no such luck. Borrowing costs for the zone"s weakest economies—the PIIGS, including Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy—remain highly elevated. That puts pressure on those governments to implement reform programs with great haste as well as pressure on the rest of the euro zone to take more and more dramatic action to stem the contagion.
The European Central Bank swooped in to buy billions of dollars of Italian and Spanish debt, which is a major deviation from the ECB"s usual policy. But it is unlikely that the ECB can handle the crisis on its own over an extended period of time.
单选题
The United States is blamed by the world for ______