New Delhi, 30 Sep. It is often said that when the US sneezes the rest of the world catches a cold. This three-part series looks at how India, China, and Russia have been affected by the US financial crisis.
Before we get into detail about how much this US problem is spreading globally, we should understand the severity of it and the possible consequences in the US. How sick is the US?
The U.S. financial meltdown has created a worldwide crisis. Ironically, worldwide scared money is still flowing into U.S. Treasury obligations as a safe haven. This permits more U.S. borrowing, but by drying up credit overseas creates financial crises in other countries.
I’ve been posting for several years on pieces of the origins of this financial crisis. Now Robert Weissman and others have attempted to put together an overall picture of what happened in Sold Out: How Wall Street and Washington Betrayed America, produced by Essential Information and the Consumer Education Foundation. More
It is superfluous to note on this blog that the world economy is passing through the most severe financial crisis since 1929.[1] Its results are also beginning to be well understood: the era of increasing deregulation has ended and instead increased, in the US very large scale, state intervention in the economy has begun.[2]
But what type of crisis is this – which greatly affects what its eventual outcome will be? More
OPTIMISM RETURNS
The results of the latest Global Economic Conditions Survey suggest that finance professionals are ready to call the bottom of the global economic downturn and believe that recovery should be possible within the next 18 months. Loss of business confidence has slowed substantially, coming to a virtual halt in key areas such as the Asia Pacific region, and even reversing in key sectors such as small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and large financial services firms.
Finance professionals, however, also point to the significant downside risks attached to such forecasts. More