Excerpt
SUMMARY: President Barack Obama spoke at FEMA where he said he will not negotiate with House Republicans while the shutdown continues. A senior presidential adviser suggested the White House might be open to a short-term debt limit increase. Judy Woodruff talks to Robert Costa of the National Review about the continuing impasse.
"Default Threat Generates Fear Around Globe" by STEVEN ERLANGER, New York Times 10/7/2013
Excerpt
The bitter fiscal stalemate in Washington is producing nervous ripples from London to Bali, with increasing anxiety that the United States might actually default on a portion of its government debt, set off global financial troubles and undercut fragile economic recoveries in many countries.
Five years after the financial crisis in the United States helped spread a deep global recession, policy makers around the world again fear collateral damage, this time with their nations becoming victims not of Wall Street’s excesses but of a political system in Washington that to many foreign eyes no longer seems to be able to function efficiently.
There is plenty of evidence that the United States remains engaged globally on many levels, with the dual commando raids on targets in Africa this weekend the most recent. But the partial shutdown of the United States government has shown again that Washington’s problems extend beyond American borders. Effectively grounded by the political crisis at home, President Obama was absent from a summit meeting of Pacific Rim leaders in Indonesia on Monday, giving China greater opportunity to highlight its role in the region.
One of the attendees, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, provided a possibly sardonic statement of sympathy for Mr. Obama. “We see what is happening in U.S. domestic politics and this is not an easy situation,” Mr. Putin said, adding, “If I was in his situation, I would not come, either.”
In Europe, the effort to reach a big new trade accord with the United States is at a standstill, with many government agencies in Washington operating with skeletal staffs. And as worrisome as that kind of delay is in Europe, it is only a precursor to the almost certain economic fallout if the United States does not raise the debt limit and defaults for the first time on government securities.
Foreigners often complain, usually with some forbearance, that the United States is so powerful that its president is in some important sense their president, too. In their case, however, they lack the opportunity to cast a vote.
There is not much that any foreigner can do about Mr. Obama’s confrontation with the House speaker, John A. Boehner, who said Sunday that his Republican members would not accept a clean bill — one with no conditions — that would raise the American debt limit before the government hits its borrowing limit and risks technical default as soon as next week. At the same time, Mr. Boehner has told colleagues privately that he would avert a default, but whether he actually has the ability to do so remains uncertain.
“The international community is asking, ‘Does the U.S. still have the will to act?’ ” said Xenia Dormandy, a senior fellow at London’s Chatham House and a former American official in the State Department and the National Security Council under President George W. Bush.
“Both the Syria vote and the current budget crisis are nerve-racking for the world,” she said, referring to Mr. Obama’s sudden decision to ask Congress to authorize a strike on Syria and then changing his mind.
Alain Frachon, a columnist and former Washington correspondent for the French newspaper Le Monde, said, “Washington is looking more like the Italian political system, with its permanent crises, and not a presidential system, as before.”
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