The world won’t follow slow-growth, weak-dollar America.
The Wall Street Journal
11/13/2010
Has there ever been a major economic summit where a U.S. President and his Treasury Secretary were as thoroughly rebuffed as they were at this week’s G-20 meeting in Seoul? We can’t think of one. President Obama failed to achieve any of his main goals while getting pounded by other world leaders for failing U.S. policies and lagging growth.
The root of this embarrassment is political and intellectual: Rather than leading the world from a position of strength, Mr. Obama and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner came to Seoul blaming the rest of the world for U.S. economic weakness. America’s problem, in their view, is the export and exchange rate policies of the Germans, Chinese or Brazilians. And the U.S. solution is to have the Fed print enough money to devalue the dollar so America can grow by stealing demand from the rest of the world. [Emphasis CAJ]
But why should anyone heed this U.S. refrain? The Germans are growing rapidly after having rejected Mr. Geithner’s advice in 2009 to join the U.S. stimulus spending blowout. China is also growing smartly having rejected counsel from three U.S. Administrations to abandon its currency discipline. The U.K. and even France are pursuing more fiscal restraint. Only the Obama Administration is determined to keep both the fiscal and monetary spigots wide open, while blaming everyone else for the poor domestic results.
,,,Mr. Obama may come to regret his political embrace of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke if commodity price increases flow through to consumer prices and leave Americans feeling poorer than they already feel.
Read the rest at WSJ.
H/T HotAir.com :
…[Obama] arrived at the G-20, fresh from his rebuff from Seoul over a trade agreement that George Bush had wrapped in a tidy bow three years ago and Democrats rejected, insisting that the industrialized nations refrain from currency manipulations — while defending the second round of quantitative easing that the Fed introduced to do just that. Obama learned the hard way that few people will follow a “Do as I say, not as I do” model of leadership, and may end up touching off a currency war as a result.
In 2008, we warned about the dangers of putting a man in the White House with no executive, military, diplomatic, or private-sector experience. It should shock no one to find that American leadership has utterly vanished on the international stage when we elect someone incapable of providing that leadership. The lesson from both the Right and Left coasts’ media is that Barack Obama is in way over his head and doesn’t have a clue how to get back to the surface.
