Word: america
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sure, there's no denying the facts. The U.S. is the world's largest debtor nation and only digging itself in deeper. Respect for corporate America is evaporating. Profligacy produced sham economic growth. A disconnect between Washington's global ambitions and its available resources - what British historian Paul Kennedy calls "imperial overstretch" - has undermined national strength...
...fully aware that American hubris and misjudgment - lots of both - have gotten us into the mess we're in. Yet at the same time, I must honestly say I'm proud of America's global achievements. Behind U.S. global expansion was an ideal of a world based on free enterprise, mutual prosperity and open societies. It was that ideal that brought my Holocaust-survivor grandparents through Ellis Island in 1949 in the hopes of rebuilding their lives and finding better opportunities for their 3-year-old daughter - my mother. These ideals have too often been trampled by greed or myopic...
...That fact has apparently been forgotten. The very concepts behind the American economy are now frowned upon as the sources of the global recession. Instead we hear praise of China's "state capitalism" - the notion that semi-command economics can work better than Economic Man. And what of America's liberal political ideology, which used to inspire suppressed peoples everywhere? I recently gave a talk to about 30 students from China at a journalism class at a Hong Kong university. Riots had erupted in China's Xinjiang province between the indigenous Uighurs and Han Chinese immigrants only days before...
...During that conference in Guangzhou, a Chinese participant asked, "Is there anything we can learn from America?" I told him I thought there was. "The U.S. has always shown an amazing ability to change itself, to morph into new things," I said. "I'm hoping that it will do so once again." Perhaps I'm nostalgic for a bygone era. Or perhaps I just realize the world is better off with a thriving America than a declining...
...linkage between Asian growth and the American consumer bears special mention. The U.S. consumer is still the dominant consumer in the global economy. Although America accounts for only about 4.5% of the world's population, its consumers spent about $10 trillion in 2008. By contrast, although China and India collectively account for nearly 40% of the world's population, their combined consumption was only about $2.5 trillion in 2008. During the boom, China and the rest of Asia reaped enormous benefits from a mercantilist growth model that was tied increasingly to the voracious appetite of the American consumer. Unfortunately, Asia...