Tuesday, August 09, 2011
It's Europe, stupid
Robert Samuelson and Andrew Ross Sorkin both zero in on the main culprit in today's financial-markets drama: Europe. Sorkin:
Robert Samuelson and Andrew Ross Sorkin both zero in on the main culprit in today's financial-markets drama: Europe. Sorkin:
(The) downgrade is almost a sideshow compared with the real reason that stocks started falling Monday morning, before panic set in and the momentum of the market took over: the intractable problems in the European Union, which look a lot more like the United States banking crisis circa 2008 than what’s happening on this side of the Atlantic now.Here's something else to watch: China. The U.S. is broke. It can't ride to Europe's rescue. There's going to be no mini-Marshall Plan coming from this side of the Atlantic. But China is a different matter. It has tons of money to invest. There's a lot of chatter China may end up bailing out Europe. And when and if it does: The whole economic ballgame will have changed. China will have truly arrived as an economic superpower. It will be historic. And a historic embarrassment to the West.
