[The] danger for the United States isn’t that there’s another financial crisis lurking out there, ready to pounce. It is instead that we’ll get confused by all the crisscrossing signals in the global economy and end up focusing on the problems we don’t have.... Our problem is unemployment. And to deal with our job shortage, we need low interest rates and, yes, continuing budget deficits to keep our economy growing. What about complaints from other countries that they’re suffering inflation because we’re printing too much money?... Russia, Brazil and China don’t have to have inflation if they don’t want it, since they always have the option of letting their currencies rise against the dollar. True, that would hurt their export interests — but economics is about hard choices, and America is under no obligation to strangle its own fragile recovery to help other nations avoid making such choices.
It’s a confusing world out there, and it’s a world that’s creating dilemmas for people like, say, Brazil’s finance minister. But here in America, we face no dilemma at all: our economic policy should be concerned with jobs, jobs and jobs.
---Krugman via DeLong
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