Important article

We all hit the send or publish key too quickly some times.

Here is a link to the article I referred to by Ha-Joon Chang in today's Guardian. 

The key points:

"The budget deficit of the zone is only about 6% of its GDP, as against the 10-11% of the US and Britain. And with the partial exception of Greece, whatever fiscal crises there exist are due to a recession-driven fall in tax revenue and bank bailouts, rather than overspending. Before the crisis, countries like Spain and Ireland used to run budget surpluses equivalent to between 2-3% of GDP, and budget deficits in Italy and Portugal were, at 1.5%-4% of GDP, entirely manageable."

and

"Even with three decades of growth and 1.3 billion people, China's economy is still just over 8.5% of the world's (as of 2009), so whatever it does pales in significance compared to what goes on in the rich world. Moreover, it faces the challenges of deflating its huge property bubble without creating a financial crisis and managing its intensifying social conflicts – it experiences thousands of riots and strikes every year."

Read the whole thing … and as I said in the last blogpost: link to it and, if you know Thomas Friedman's personal e-mail, send it to him.