La crise économique et l’“exception américaniste”

La crise économique et l’“exception américaniste”

C’est une amère satisfaction de lire sous la plume d’un chroniqueur (Jeremy Warner) du très pro-américaniste Daily Telegraph des phrases telles que  : “il y a une vérité sous-jacente qui est souvent ignorée : nombre des problèmes actuels de l’économie mondiale ne sont pas internationaux du tout, mais spécifiquement US et ne peuvent être résolus que par l’Amérique elle-même”… Ce que, – rassurons-le tout en devinant qu’il (Warner) s’en doute un peu, – l’Amérique ne fera pas. («The US has no strategy for the jobless and no strategy for rolling back debt.») D’où, effectivement, ce sentiment de l’irréversible rechute vers la catastrophe («Little wonder that a renewed sense of gloom has settled on international policy makers.»)

En quelques mots, nous avons résumé le sentiment principal de ce long article du 11 octobre 2010, où, à la lumière de la dernière réunion du FMI, Jeremy Warner nous explique longuement et savamment cette évidence de l’immense et quasi-exclusive responsabilité des USA dans une crise qui est celle du système dont elle s’est faite la génitrice et la promotrice inlassables. Autant pour la globalisation, qui ne sert qu’à diffuser dans le monde entier, – notamment en Europe, qui brûle tant d’encens devant le “modèle américain”, – une crise spécifique de l’Amérique et du système de l’américanisme.

«The destructive trade and capital imbalances of the pre-crisis era are back, banking reform appears stuck in paralysing discord, public debt in many advanced economies remains firmly set on the road to ruin, and the spirit of international co-operation that saw nations come together to fight the crisis has largely disappeared.

»This was not where we were meant to be in tackling the underlying causes of the crisis and returning the world to sustainable growth. Yet beneath this sense of frustration at lack of progress – and at international organisations such as the IMF and the G20 to bring it about - there is an underlying truth that's often left unspoken; many of the problems in the world economy right now are not international at all, but US specific and can only really be solved by America itself.

»I don't want to belittle the difficulties faced by some of the peripheral eurozone nations, but in the scale of things they are a sideshow alongside the malaise which has settled on the world's largest economy.

»Ignoring the troubled fringe, Europe as a whole is to almost universal surprise starting to look in reasonable shape again, and for reasons that I will come to, Europeans are in any case not nearly as fixated by high unemployment as their American peers.

»What applies to the eurozone is also true of the UK. As in Europe, the dominant issue in UK policy is not joblessness, but unsustainable public debt. There's a real, and growing, trans-Atlantic divide in perceptions and rhetoric. And with good reason… […]

»There's no political appetite or will in the US for the long term entitlement reform and tax increases necessary to bring the deficit under control. Nobody believes US Treasury forecasts that public debt will be stabilised by 2014. Much more believable are IMF estimates which see gross US debt rising to well in excess of 110pc of GDP by 2015.

»The US has no strategy for the jobless and no strategy for rolling back debt. Little wonder that a renewed sense of gloom has settled on international policy makers.»

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