America's Standing in the World

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How can we make the global economy work for America?

Well yes. I think the global economy can still be made to work for America. We are still one of the top recipients of foreign direct investment in the world. This whole discussions of sovereign wealth funds that money does not need to go only in to Wall Street to bail up private banks and their misdeeds and wrong decisions and poor judgments, they can also be channeled into broader infrastructure investments in America that build up our capacity to create jobs, to boost our high tech productivity and so forth in ways that make America’s long term global economic presents server newed for the 21st century which happens again only in certain pockets.

We brag about SiliconValley. We have very low broadband internet penetration rate around the country far lower than in Europe for example.

So we do need a serious infrastructural overhaul and with our deficit right now, obviously we need foreign capital to do that for us. So if we were able to redirect some of that creatively, it is a failure of imagination really on our part. We still stand the chance of making America competitive.

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Well, it is interesting. We have the perfect example of how to reconcile with this Latin America. We face competition from Asian producers that are far cheaper and more efficient than we are, but we have Latin America which is very inefficient but yet very close to us. If we were too invest in Latin America for productivity and joint exports with Latin firms or American owned firms in Latin America, we could potentially be or become as a region or hemispheric kind of area, more competitive with Asia and profit more from it. But we do not that.

But we did do in the 1960’s it was called Alliance for Progress and it worked and it built the infrastructural base in Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere.

So to do things like that again, would really serve American interest but we have not been as broad in our investments as we need to be in those countries in order to keep them afloat and find ways to partner in leverage with they can export to the world in order to profit ourselves.


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