The American Exception

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The American Exception
Le Point, France
By Pierre-Antoine Delhommais
Translated By Amelie Filliatre
25 October 2012
Edited by Molly Rusk

Goldman Sachs employees are ungrateful. Four years ago, they were among the most generous contributors to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. This time around, according to the Wall Street Journal, 75 percent of their donations went to Republican candidate Mitt Romney. And yet they do not have much call to complain about President Obama’s mandate. While it is true that the president called them “fat cats,” he has also allowed them to carry on playing the game at which they excel: pure and unbridled speculation. Goldman Sachs has just announced a third quarter net profit of $1.5 billion and company executives should receive bonuses averaging around $500,000 for the year 2012. “Yes they can.”

Goldman Sachs, then, is as healthy as it is hated, Wall Street is in good shape (up 11 percent since Jan. 1) and the American economy is doing better —at least, much better than that of the Eurozone. But, to be fair, that is not saying much. The unemployment rate, which had reached 10 percent in late 2009, has just gone back down below 8 percent. Credit cards are once again burning holes in the pockets of consumers, whose spirits have perked up. Even the property market, where the subprime virus originated, is recovering.

As a result, while the European GDP will fall 0.2 percent this year, that of the United States will increase by 2.3 percent. This is a much slower rate than before the financial meltdown, but it is enough for Barack Obama to enter the election race as a favorite. It is also enough to induce jealousy in all the European leaders who lost political power because of this crisis, which originated in the United States.

To paraphrase the words of Boris Cyrulnik, the American economy has once again shown its power of resilience, its capacity to rebuild itself after a devastating blow, as it did after the Internet bubble burst. From one blow to another, economists always provide the same explanations: better reactivity of financial policies, the flexibility of the job market and technical innovations associated with the excellence of universities, which attract the best brains on the planet, allowing for substantial gains in productivity.