US may be ultimate winner of global financial crisis
- Source: Global Times
- [00:17 January 25 2010]
- Comments
Illustration: Liu Rui
By Zhang Yugui
On Thursday, China's National Bureau of Statistics announced that Chinese GDP increased by 8.7 percent in 2009, thus meeting the target of sustaining 8 percent growth. Recently, Tao Dong, managing director of the Swiss bank Credit Suisse, said that China might be the winner of this financial crisis. Based on this reasoning, the US, which led the international economy before the crisis, would be the loser.
Is it true? In this tumultuous era, more and more top analysts, who are supposed to be strict, are throwing out controversial opinions without empirical analysis or research just in order to attract attention. Perhaps this is also a byproduct of the financial crisis.
However, the conclusion that China is the winner of the financial crisis and the US is the loser is not convincing.
The US is good at strategic games and China still needs to be well prepared. Although we cannot say that the US intentionally set off the crisis, the world economy went through a struggle for survival. Medium and small economies are dying. Russia is in misery. The UK, France and Germany, which used to have healthy economies, are also suffering.
Even Japan, which has held second place in the global economy for a long time, might enter another "lost decade." Trade protectionism is raging around the world and export-dependent economies have suffered badly.
However, the US has not reduced the scale of its operations around the world; on the contrary, it has released some "negative" economic policies from time to time to make other countries nervous.
As it has mastered the crucial point of the world economy, the international monetary standard currency, the US is not very worried. Although the economic and financial crisis that evolved from the subprime mortgage crisis has damaged the financial credibility of the US, it has also caused serious losses to its major competitors.
