'Political Numskulls'

Niall Ferguson in the Sunday Telegraph critises the US congress's decision to block a company from the United Arab Emirates from aquiring the facilities in some American Ports.

The White House strongly supported the United Arab Emirates company in question and opposed Congress's decision (President Bush argued Congress was being deeply prejudiced). Ferguson makes the point that the US's economy (and by extension it's very expensive foreign policy) is extremely dependent on foreign capital. Congress's decision has sent out a very counter productive message.

Here's a sample of the article:

"The outbreak of world war in 1914 led to an immediate breakdown in international trade. Even before that, a backlash against free trade and migration had begun, as one state after another moved to raise tariffs or restrict immigration, trends that reached their disastrous nadir in the 1930s. Call it a globotomy. For it was deliberate action by the Numskulls themselves that severed the world's neural pathways.

Today the Numskulls doing the most to lobotomise the global mind are to be found (not for the first time in history) in the US Congress. Earlier this month, Senators effectively blocked a company based in the United Arab Emirates from acquiring facilities in American ports on the ground that their employees might help Islamist
terrorists.

Not content with this insult to Middle Eastern investors, the same body last week came within a hair's breadth of defaulting on the federal debt, voting by just four votes to increase the legal debt ceiling. Given that around half that debt is held abroad, this was playing with financial fire.

Never in the history of the world economy has one advanced economy been as reliant on inflows of foreign capital as the United States today. It's that international overdraft which allows Our Man to keep sucking in and consuming foreign goodies. Unfortunately, the Numskulls in Congress seem more worried about impending mid-term elections than the stability of the global economy."


And here's the Ferguson piece in full:


If avian flu doesn't get us, the political Numskulls will

Niall Ferguson
The Sunday Telegraph