A weak dollar, outsized personal debt, a massive current account deficit, cash-strapped banks and Asian governments purchasing U.S. Treasury bonds to finance the national debt are not signs of American strength. Nor are they necessarily signs of American decline, because inherent U.S. vitality remains enormous.<\/p>\n
But as Benn Steil, an economist at the Council on Foreign Relations, suggested: “We could be seeing a secular shift in confidence in the dollar as a store of value as the impression grows that the United States, to some degree, is losing control of its destiny.”<\/p>\n
I expect the United States to bounce back, but not quickly. The central fact confronting the next president will be the new limits on U.S. power, both military and economic.<\/p>\n
The central challenge will be the provision of needed reforms, primarily universal health care, that begin to alleviate the financial strains on median American families and allow them to get back to saving rather than leveraging assets in a phony consumption boom.<\/p>\n
This won’t be easy. But then it wasn’t easy for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a far worse situation in 1933.<\/p>\n
Read it all<\/a> and the blog discussion also<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A weak dollar, outsized personal debt, a massive current account deficit, cash-strapped banks and Asian governments purchasing U.S. Treasury bonds to finance the national debt are not signs of American strength. Nor are they necessarily signs of American decline, because…<\/span><\/p>\n