Le fardeau irakien

Le fardeau irakien

Dans un article du Washington Post du 5 septembre 2010, les économistes Joseph Stiglitz et Linda J. Bilmes fixent le coût de la guerre en Irak à largement plus de $3.000 milliards. RAW Story, qui présente cet article le 4 septembre 2010, met en évidence l’aspect le plus important de l’analyse des deux économistes, qui est l’effet direct de la guerre en Irak sur les crises intérieures qu’ont connues et que connaissent les USA, notamment la crise financière de septembre 2008 et la crise économique.

«The financial crisis that rocked the world in 2008 and still reverberates today was “due at least in part” to the Iraq war, which also made it more difficult for the government to react when economic problems happened, argue two prominent policy makers.

»In an article in Sunday's Washington Post, former Clinton-era economic adviser Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University public policy lecturer Linda J. Bilmes say that the Iraq war forced the US to take on more debt than it had to, and caused in part the rising oil prices that resulted in large amounts of money flowing out of the US economy.

»To counter the effects of those trends, fiscal policy makers had to keep interest rates unnaturally low, causing the securities and real estate bubbles that burst at the start of the recession, the authors say.

»The authors also amended their assessment from several years ago that the Iraq war's true cost is around $3 trillion, saying new information suggests that the cost goes “beyond” that estimate.

»Stiglitz and Bilmes write:

»“Saying what might have been is always difficult, especially with something as complex as the global financial crisis, which had many contributing factors. Perhaps the crisis would have happened in any case. But almost surely, with more spending at home, and without the need for such low interest rates and such soft regulation to keep the economy going in its absence, the bubble would have been smaller, and the consequences of its breaking therefore less severe. To put it more bluntly: The war contributed indirectly to disastrous monetary policy and regulations.

»“The Iraq war didn't just contribute to the severity of the financial crisis, though; it also kept us from responding to it effectively. Increased indebtedness meant that the government had far less room to maneuver than it otherwise would have had. More specifically, worries about the (war-inflated) debt and deficit constrained the size of the stimulus, and they continue to hamper our ability to respond to the recession. With the unemployment rate remaining stubbornly high, the country needs a second stimulus. But mounting government debt means support for this is low. The result is that the recession will be longer, output lower, unemployment higher and deficits larger than they would have been absent the war.”

»Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate that about a quarter of the debt increase the US saw during the first five years of the war are attributable to the war – about $900 billion of a $3.6 trillion rise in the debt. They also estimate that the war added about $10 to the cost of a barrel of oil, amounting to a cost of $250 billion to the US economy…»

dedefensa.org