Get Ready for your Recession
Columnist Steven Pearlstein, in last Friday's WaPo:

Let's give a warm Washington welcome to the finance ministers and central bankers who are in town from all corners of the globe to attend the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. [snip]

We'd just ask one teensy, tiny favor: Get real. Forget about the cheerleading and the macroeconomic mumbo jumbo. Put aside domestic political considerations and your cherished institutional prerogatives. History will record this as your last, best chance to acknowledge that the global economic machinery is badly out of whack and to finally do something to fix it.

There's no dispute about what needs to be done. None. The United States has to raise taxes, curb government spending and get short-term interest rates up to 4.5 percent in the next year. [snip]

More significantly, it makes no sense to take capital from developing countries, where it could be invested to generate higher productivity from a growing workforce, and ship it to the United States, where it is used to bid up the price of real estate and let the people who are already the world's richest live beyond their means. Capital is supposed to flow the other way -- and at some point, it will.

The only question now is how this return to the normal order will be accomplished. Alan Greenspan, John Snow and the others could still surprise us this weekend by announcing a bold, coordinated effort to bring about an orderly rebalancing of the global economy. Or they could party on, waiting until growth slows, inflation takes off, the dollar collapses and a series of financial crises does it for them.

Well, judging by what I read here and here, looks like they decided to party on, dudes. It's the Bill and Ted style of governing. Monday sure looks to be interesting.
- posted by TJ @ 3:52 PM