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Why The Rest of the World Isn’t Helping With the Bailout

 

Posted by Cliff Lyon in This Blog on September 25th, 2008


By: Ian Welsh Thursday September 25, 2008 3:45 pm

You may have noticed the rather frigid response to requests that the rest of the world help with the bailout. European leaders coldly said no, so did Chinese, so did, well, pretty much everyone. And China instructed its banks to not lend to American banks.

You might be wondering why. Let’s start with the history: basically the US spent the last seven and a half years borrowing money from the rest of the world and spent it on tax cuts for your rich, a war that most of the world didn’t agree with (that’s Iraq) and on consumption. The money inflow was extreme, at one point in 2005 some surveys were showing it as being more than the total interest on all the money in the world (ie. all the legal money, plus drug money). Everyone warned the US, including the IMF, but the US just went on its merry way with a war no one wanted and fiscal policies clearly aimed at making its rich even richer and impoverishing its middle class. read on…

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008, 4:33 pm and is filed under This Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. #1 by Leo Brown on September 25, 2008 - 9:36 pm

    We are economic rivals. We exported toxic financial products. The global economy has taken a big hit. Why should we expect them to help us out of a crisis of our own making?

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  2. #2 by Richard Warnick on September 26, 2008 - 8:06 am

    Here’s the best part:

    You obviously can’t afford the war in Iraq, for example. Why aren’t you ending it? Now. Not “sometime”, but NOW. Forget the BS about how long it would take to pull out, if you want to do it fast, you can do it fast. And you’re spending more money on your military than the rest of the world combined. Back when you used to do things with that military that the rest of the world sort of liked, like say dealing with Bosnia, people were willing to help you keep it. But now that you’ve proved you can’t be trusted with it, everyone’s wondering why they should help pay for it. You don’t need that big a military to defend yourself, you only need it if you want to run around and knock over some more countries.

    It’s not mentioned in Welsh’s essay, but the main reason our NATO allies are pulling troops out of Afghanistan is because they don’t want to support the Iraq occupation. The Afghanistan mission is a worthy one, but the allies know that every soldier they send there enables a U.S. soldier to stay in Iraq.

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