Der Spiegel

I may subscribe to this magazine. It seems able to look at the world more truthfully than most of our periodicals. Take the latest issue in which the lead article is entitled "America Loses Its Dominant Economic Role". Here are some pieces of the article I found fascinating.

• I can't say that I spent much time trying to find out how Bush did at the UN, but Der Spiegel and, I suspect, many other foreign magazines, spent time analyzing his speech. They quote a German diplomat's comment on the speech, "Absurd, absurd, absurd". The focus of the speech was terrorism, but everybody else was concerned about the economic situation.
• Germany is pissed off because for the past three years they have been urging tighter control of the international markets and we have opposed them.
• The authors see our problem as stemming from three 'rules' - cheap money, free markets and double-digit profit margins - which define American 'turbo-capitalism'. And it is our form of capitalism that has been the dominant economic force for the past 25 years.
• They quote an American economist I had never heard of, Raghuram Rajan, warning against the tightly integrated system the world's economy had become.

There is the usual chapter and verse outlining the severity of the problem here and in Germany. Although the authors laud Germany's risk-averse, savings-oriented economy, they are not gloating. They are worried as to whether the Europeans will be up to the task, for they close with the following. "In the past, the US government's solo efforts provided the Europeans with an all-too-comfortable excuse for simply doing nothing. But that excuse is no longer valid."