America Will Remain the Superpower
When the tide laps at Gulliver’s waistline, it usually means the Lilliputians are already 10 feet under.

Before yesterday’s surge, the Dow had dropped 25% in three months. But that only means it had outperformed nearly every single major foreign stock exchange, including Germany’s XETRADAX (down 28%) China’s Shanghai exchange (down 30%), Japan’s NIKK225 (down 37%), Brazil’s BOVESPA (down 41%) and Russia RTSI (down 61%). These contrasts are a useful demonstration that America’s financial woes are nobody else’s gain.
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This isn’t to say that the abrupt failure of the SOEs would be in anyone’s interests, including the U.S.‘s. But one of the unremarked ironies of the present crisis is that America’s financial vulnerabilities came fully into view months before Europe’s (or the rest of the world’s) did. That’s one reason the dollar has rallied in recent months. It’s also why the U.S. is likely to come through the crisis much more quickly than, say, Japan, which spent the better part of the 1990s hiding its own banking crisis from itself.

Exactly how—and how quickly—the U.S. does come through is anyone’s guess. Recessions are periodic facts of economic life that tend to last anywhere between six and 16 months. Severe recessions or depressions are fundamentally political events that can last a decade or longer—however long economic policy remains bad.”

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