07/dec/2009 EURAST recomandă: Niall Ferguson despre destinul Americii ca mare putere

An Empire at Risk

We won the cold war and weathered 9/11. But now economic weakness is endangering our global power.

 With pundits speculating about the end of American global dominance, a look back on the rise and fall of the world’s great powers.

 By Niall Ferguson | NEWSWEEK

Published Nov 28, 2009 – From the Newsweek magazine issue dated Dec 7, 2009

Call it the fractal geometry of fiscal crisis. If you fly across the Atlantic on a clear day, you can look down and see the same phenomenon but on four entirely different scales. At one extreme there is tiny Iceland. Then there is little Ireland, followed by medium-size Britain. They’re all a good deal smaller than the mighty United States. But in each case the economic crisis has taken the same form: a massive banking crisis, followed by an equally massive fiscal crisis as the government stepped in to bail out the private financial system.

Size matters, of course. For the smaller countries, the financial losses arising from this crisis are a great deal larger in relation to their gross domestic product than they are for the United States. Yet the stakes are higher in the American case. In the great scheme of things—let’s be frank—it does not matter much if Iceland teeters on the brink of fiscal collapse, or Ireland, for that matter. The locals suffer, but the world goes on much as usual.

(text integral format word doc. – An Empire at Risk – Niall Ferguson )

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