No man is an island.
Neither is a country.
As noted here last November 18, the U.S. economy is healthy, but faces pressure from other nations still struggling. Events of the past few days have borne out this caution.
In China, stock markets were shut down early for two consecutive days this week because of massive sell offs. That stumble rippled around the world, sending Wall Street indexes off a cliff.
And despite continuing job growth in America -- the Labor Department reported that last month, U.S. employers added more than a quarter million workers to their payrolls as the unemployment rate held steady at 5 percent -- investors seemed more worried about overseas problems than they were confident about American economic health.
Even last month, as the Federal Reserve Board juiced up a key interest rate, the nation's central bank cautioned that it would continue to keep a wary eye on international developments, and it expects that economic conditions will evolve only gradually. Therefore, interest rates will remain low. The Fed added this caution, that the "actual path of the federal funds rate will depend on the economic outlook."
Translation: Things may look OK now, but a financial storm overseas could well send the U.S. economic ship off its course to prosperity.
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