Embassy Events
Chargé d’Affaires Eddins Urges International Cooperation to End Economic Crisis
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| Trader on floor of New York Stock Exchange. (www.america.gov) |
In an opinion piece Keith Eddins, Chargé d’Affaires, penned for the March 31 edition of Hospodárske Noviny, he writes that the Obama administration has intervened to inject capital and liquidity into banks and insurers, to guarantee home mortgages and to insure bank deposits. More recently, informs Mr. Eddins, the U.S. Treasury Department introduced a system of stress-testing banks to ensure that they are adequately capitalized to provide credit in our troubled economy. Besides stabilizing the financial sector, we have moved to stimulate the economy through a combination of government backing for business loans, tax cuts for middle- and lower-income workers, and vastly increased public spending. Mr. Eddins stressed that since the beginning of the crisis, the U.S. has encouraged a coordinated response among the major world economies. We are working with the EU, the G-8, and the international financial institutions to stabilize the international monetary system and restore liquidity across borders; President Obama meets with his G-20 colleagues in London on April 1. We continue to encourage our international trading partners to resist politically popular calls for protectionism and economic nationalism - ill-conceived notions that significantly extended the Depression in the 1930s, writes Mr. Eddins, and that currently, we are asking our European partners to work proactively - with President Obama - to ensure that the hardest-hit European economies are not allowed to fail. To permit their collapse would expose healthier economies in the region to enormous collateral damage and much greater future expense to repair that damage. Mr. Eddins finishes by saying that we need to set the right tone as we confront these dark, uncertain times. Blaming others or going it alone is not the solution. We did that in the 1930s, and all of us paid a very heavy price for it - Central Europe more than most.
