Geo-economic hegemon no more?
It boasted the ‘Committee to Save the World’ in the late-1990s. Today, however, amid mounting global crises, the US is more akin to an ineffective global bystander.
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SOME readers may have been too young to recall the famous Time magazine cover of Feb 15, 1999, featuring the three leading economic policymakers in the administration of then US President Bill Clinton – Alan Greenspan, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin – and hailing them as “The Committee to Save the World” for their successful efforts to avert an Asian financial crisis.
Greenspan, then the chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury; and Summers, his deputy, were celebrated on the cover of Time as the “Three Marketeers (who) have prevented a global economic meltdown”.
Time’s cover story went on to note that the three economic stars of the Clinton administration had “outgrown ideology” and shared a faith “in the markets and in their ability to analyse them” and agreed “that trying to defy global market forces is in the end futile”.
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