After tripling the US deficit in a year, increasing the federal budget by a trillion dollars in a little over 3 years, adding $4 trillion to the national debt in two-and-a-half years and overseeing the first downgrade of the American economy in a century, our failed president felt he was just the man to lecture Europe on fiscal responsibility this week.
They didn’t take it so well.
Nile Gardiner at The Telegraph says it best:
As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported, Germany’s finance minister Wolfang Schauble has launched a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration after Washington pushed for the European Union to boost its EFSF bail out fund. After Obama declared that the European financial crisis is “scaring the world”, Schauble shot back at the US president by warning: “It’s always much easier to give advice to others than to decide for yourself. I am well prepared to give advice to the US government.” He also made it clear what he thought of the idea of increasing the 440 billion euro lending limit, a position supported by US Treasury Chief Tim Geithner:
I don’t understand how anyone in the European Commission can have such a stupid idea. The result would be to endanger the AAA sovereign debt ratings of other member states. It makes no sense.
It is rather ironic that Barack Obama, who has probably done more damage to the American economy that any president in modern US history, is now lecturing European leaders on their financial problems as well. The Obama administration’s track record of out-of-control government spending and borrowing, a $1.3 trillion budget deficit (the largest since World War Two), combined with mammoth bailouts, has been nothing short of disastrous. 14 million Americans are out of work, the housing market is in a state of collapse, and job growth is practically non-existent outside of the Washington Beltway. And the advice his flailing government is now giving across the Atlantic will inevitably prolong the huge economic turmoil in Europe, rather than help bring it to an end.
The administration’s entire approach to the European Union is fundamentally flawed, and is based on the underlying premise that the EU needs more integration, not less, with a greater pooling of national sovereignty.
Hat Tip Gini
