Reacciones

De Nick Rowe

"Look, I'm pro-American. I like the US. It's a great country. We could do a hell of a lot worse than the US as the choice for the world's most powerful country, and I don't think we could do a hell of a lot better, in practice. But that doesn't mean that US government bonds have some sort of divine right of kings to be rated AAA. There's more than one measure of the worth of a country, and those measures don't have to be perfectly correlated.

FWIW, which isn't very much at all, I'm not sure I would rate US government bonds AAA either. That's got very little to do with any economic analysis. It's my crude and very amateur political analysis that leads me to that view. I'm not sure the US system of government can get its act together to follow any coherent plan that conforms to the long run government budget constraint. It's not the numbers, it's the governance. The UK has had debt/GDP ratios twice the current US ratio more than once in the past.

But the US has been written off too many times in the past. I'm old enough to remember when educated opinion thought the Soviet Union would replace it. And then Japan. Now it's China. I've learned to be sceptical. And I'm no good at history.

But a little bit of historical and international perspective might be good for the US right now. Which is where I came in, with my bleg."