RUSSIAN PRESIDENT MEDVEDEV: GLOBAL ECONOMY PAYS FOR AMERICAN BLUNDERS
Center for Research on Globalization
October 23, 2008
Canada
"We are paying for others’ – primarily American – blunders." This
is how the President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, assesses the state
of affairs in the global economy. Medvedev was speaking at a news
conference in the Armenian capital Yerevan.
He blamed the global financial crisis hit so hard because the American
market played such a big role and exerted such a big influence on
the global economy. What any national government is supposed to do,
he said, is try to pull through with minimum losses. Comment from an
analyst with the Russian business consulting agency Alexander Yakovlev.
Yes, the U.S. strategies of the past eight years fanned the flames of
the latest crisis. Yes, the configuration of the American financial
system contributed to the crisis. But lots of national economies
are as different as can be from the American one, and they have been
charting their own courses. Yet, they have also felt the impact of
the current financial crisis. So, Yakovlev says, the United States
of America bears part of the blame, and other nations, with economic
policies of their own, bear part of the blame, too. Crises have never
been products of human efforts; they have long plagued the global
economy and are caused by a number of things. But crises come and
go, and there is no end to development. In other words, cyclicity is
still there; no one has been able to rule it out.
Some experts feel it will take the global economy much less time to
cope with this crisis than it took it to cope with the crisis of
the early 20th century. Because, today’s economy is, unlike that
of the bygone years, global and far more flexible. Economists say
the current problems have only put the limelight on the need for an
overhaul of global financial architecture. And, this is, by the way,
what a United Nations’ expert task team, headed by Nobel-winning
economist Joseph Stiglitz, is called to focus on, although the think
tank of the International Monetary Fund have already understood that
a way to end this crisis will be shown by the fledgling economies of
Russia, China, India, and Brazil.
It is not only IMF experts but the leaders of the hardest-hit western
economies who have understood that. U.S. President George W.Bush has
held telephone conversations with Chairman Hu Jintao of China and
the leaders of other developing nations. President Bush wants them
to support international efforts for economic stability. His French
counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy and the head of the European Commission,
Jose Barroso, are, in the meantime, planning an early visit to
Beijing where they will try to talk China and India into joining an
international summit conference on ways to end the global crisis.