19 of 77,
Again, I have to strongly disagree with your claim that the EU is in worse shape than the US and UK. The UK and US are both suffering from the following effects:
- housing market collapse;
- collapse of the financial sector;
- highest consumer debt in the world.
People in the US and the UK have lived way above their paygrade. The three effects mentioned above are devastating for the UK and US since their economy is consumer driven (far more than any EU country, with the exception of Ireland).
Fact is that the consumers and governments in the EU countries, with the exception of Ireland, have been more austere since WWII and economies are less consumer driven. In the EU, the framework for public sector spending is in place, the public sector forms a significant part of economic activity and governments have cash more easily available to ease the effects of an economic downturn. On top of that, in most EU countries people sit on a significant amount of savings.
In the US the new administration only recently unveiled plans to increase public spending, but the US government is burdened with a record government debt (thanks, W!) and no quick way of generating more cash other than borrowing even more. This will pose a problem, because cash will have to come from outside the US and from countries with a doubtful political agenda. Nobody has money to spend since real estate has effectively halved in value (creating negative equity) and nobody has any savings. The government also needs money to come to the rescue of carmakers who failed to evolve into profitability but will drag their whole economy down when they fail and there is no social security in place worth mentioning. Oh yeah, let's not forget the annual 600 billion dollars of military spending to which they're committed (and that's not even counting the extra cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).
At least the UK's government finances are less desparate, and they don't have to spend money on saving companies that are large enough to drag the whole UK economy down ('cause there aren't any...). Apart from that, they're far more f***ed than the Eurozone.
Yes, the Eurozone faces difficulties. The effects, however, are more spread, eased by a more conservative financial tradition and traditionally European countries have a framework in place to avoid sharp boom-bust cycles while the Anglo-Saxon world does not. Big difference.