De Verenigde Staten en haar problemen

Gestart door Elzenga, 26/07/2011 | 16:13 uur

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

Rivalen van VS azen op zwaktes van 'enige supermacht'

zaterdag 04 januari 2014

Van de Perzische Golf tot de Zuid-Chinese Zee wordt de veiligheid van de wereld geschraagd door de Amerikaanse militaire macht. In 2014 rijzen twijfels over de bereidheid van de VS om de rol van politieagent van de wereld te spelen. China en Rusland staan klaar om die leemte te vullen.

De crisis in Syrië bracht de Amerikaanse tegenzin om weer betrokken te worden bij een militaire interventie aan de oppervlakte. Het ging niet alleen om de aarzeling waarmee Barack Obama de kwestie van strafexpedities tegen het regime van Bashar Assad benaderde. Het ging er ook over dat het Congres nog sceptischer stond tegenover militaire actie dan het Witte Huis, en dat de bevolking categorisch tegen was.

In die omstandigheden benaderen de VS alle buitenlandse tussenkomsten, en vooral in het Midden-Oosten, met de grootste omzichtigheid. De belangrijkste reden daarvoor is de oorlogsmoeheid na twaalf jaar strijd in Afghanistan en Irak. Obama wil zich concentreren op 'nationbuilding' in eigen huis.

De economische problemen hebben die neo-isolationistische houding nog versterkt. De Verenigde Staten hebben al zwaar bespaard op hun defensiebudget en dat laat zich in de loop van het volgende decennium voelen. Die trend wordt in 2014 bevestigd als het ministerie van Defensie zijn vierjaarlijkse Defence Review uitbrengt.

De Verenigde Staten waren sinds de jaren tachtig van de negentiende eeuw de grootste economie ter wereld. Het duurt niet lang meer - tegen 2020 volgens The Economist - of China eist die titel voor zich op. Sommige Amerikaanse strategen hebben aangevoerd dat de VS moeten reageren op de opkomst van de rest door langs diplomatieke en militaire kanalen duidelijk te maken dat ze niet van plan zijn hun wereldomvattende leiderschap op te geven, zeker aan China. Maar het Syrische drama, gekoppeld aan de uitspraken van de president over nationbuilding, stuurt een veel dubbelzinniger boodschap uit.

De grote vraag is in hoeverre de rivalen van de VS in 2014 besluiten de 'enige supermacht' op de proef te stellen. De internationale krijgsmacht, waarvan de VS met gemak het grootste deel vormen, rondt in 2014 de terugtrekking uit Afghanistan af. Het risico bestaat dat in de nasleep de opstandige taliban militaire winst boeken. Om het met de woorden te zeggen die Henry Kissinger gebruikte toen de Vietnam-oorlog ten einde liep, hopen de Verenigde Staten op een 'treffelijk interval' tussen de terugtrekking uit Afghanistan en de eventueel daaropvolgende desintegratie van het politieke systeem dat werd achtergelaten.

China geeft niet toe

In het Midden-Oosten pogen de Verenigde Staten met diplomatieke middelen invloed uit te oefenen. Ze sturen aan op een politieke oplossing in Syrië en onderzoeken of de nieuwe Iraanse president, Hassan Rohani, te vinden is voor een nucleair akkoord. De invloed van de VS lijdt onder de perceptie dat hun militaire macht van de tafel is. De officiële lijn blijft dat alle opties opengehouden worden om het nucleaire programma van Iran te fnuiken, maar de Iraniërs kunnen evengoed tot het besluit komen dat de dreiging van een Amerikaanse aanval afneemt. Het land blijft zich zorgen maken over de toenemende efficiëntie van de economische boycot en de kans op Israëlische luchtaanvallen.

Buiten het Midden-Oosten blijven China en Rusland de belangrijkste geopolitieke rivalen van de VS. Beide putten moed uit de aanwijzingen dat de Amerikaanse rode lijnen vervagen. China zou een nog meer confronterende houding tegenover Japan kunnen aannemen in het gevaarlijke dispuut over de onbewoonde eilanden in de Oost-Chinese Zee waarop ze allebei aanspraak maken. De Chinese regering, die een alsmaar hardere lijn volgt in de territoriale geschillen met haar buren, geeft in 2014 geen duimbreed toe.

Ook het Rusland van Vladimir Poetin beweegt zich met toenemend vertrouwen op het wereldtoneel. Rusland is vastbesloten weer een invloedssfeer te creëren in de vroegere Sovjet-Unie en het Midden-Oosten. Buren die het Kremlin mishagen, waaronder Georgië en Oekraïne, worden in het komende jaar nog meer onder druk gezet. Poetin wil ook voortbouwen op zijn bedreven diplomatie tijdens de Syrische crisis en wel met twee bedoelingen: de internationale weerstand tegen de ontplooiing van Amerikaanse militaire macht aanmoedigen en voor Rusland een centrale rol verzekeren in de wereldpolitiek.

Al die ontwikkelingen wijzen op een riskanter politiek wereldtoneel in 2014. De Verenigde Staten, die beschermd worden door twee oceanen, zijn relatief afgeschermd voor die risico's. Het is elders in de wereld dat het nieuwe veiligheidsklimaat op de proef gesteld wordt.

Gideon Rachman (chef columnist buitenlandse zaken van de Financial Times)

http://trends.knack.be/economie/nieuws/dossiers/de-wereld-in-2014/rivalen-van-vs-azen-op-zwaktes-van-enige-supermacht/article-4000489610866.htm

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

Citaat van: Elzenga op 17/11/2013 | 10:03 uur
Ben benieuwd wat dit voor effect zal hebben op het F-35 programma...

Het zal mij eerder benieuwen of Europa haar verantwoordelijkheid in een meer degelijke defensie durft te nemen.

Elzenga

Ben benieuwd wat dit voor effect zal hebben op het F-35 programma...

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

Pentagon chief sounds alarm over US budget cuts

World | Agence France-Presse | Updated: November 17, 2013

Simi Valley, United States:  US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel sounded an alarm bell Saturday about budget cuts he said threaten America's security and global military role, while "gambling" over the risk of an unexpected threat.

The cuts, which amount to nearly $1 trillion for the Department of Defence over a decade, were "too steep, too deep and too abrupt," Hagel told a defence conference in California.

"This is an irresponsible way to govern, and it forces the department into a very bad set of choices."

Automatic cuts of $52 billion set to take place in fiscal 2014 represent 10 percent of the Pentagon budget.

The Navy's global presence is already down 10 percent since sequestration began in March, while the Army has canceled training rotations for 15 percent of its forces and the Air Force 25 percent of its training events.

"The effects will be felt for a long period of time to come. By continuing to cancel training for non-deploying personnel, we will create a backlog of training requirements that could take years to recover from," Hagel said.

"These cuts are too steep, too deep, too abrupt."

The defence chief was speaking at the Ronald Reagan Defense Forum, a one-day event hosted at the late US leader's presidential library northwest of Los Angeles.

The Pentagon has made clear to Congress and the White House "the growing difficulties we face in training, equipping and preparing our forces under a cloud of budget restraints and uncertainty," Hagel said.

"These challenges are often not visible, but they are very very real, and they will become more visible as they further jeopardize the security of our country as our readiness, capability and capacity continue to deteriorate."

The budget crisis comes as the US military is drawing back after more than a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan following the September 11, 2011 attacks.

But Hagel warned that if a deal is not reached to stave off the deepest cuts, US forces might not be ready if another major conflict erupts unexpectedly.

"If sequester-level cuts persist, we risk fielding a force that is unprepared," he said.

"In effect, we would be gambling that we will not face a major contingency operation against a capable adversary in the near-term."

The sequester was devised as a poison-pill austerity program in 2012, with mandatory cuts spread over 10 years aiming to force battling Republicans and Democrats to compromise on a long-term program to reduce the country's deficit.

But a deal never came and the White House was forced to lop $85 billion from spending between March and the end of the fiscal year on September 30, with nearly half of that from defense programs.

Hagel's predecessor Leon Panetta also made no bones about the crisis facing the US military, in a panel discussion shortly preceding the current Pentagon chief's closing speech.

Panetta said the cuts would impact "almost in every area where we have been able to respond, whether it's military crisis, whether it's a need to go in and try to rescue people, whether it's the need to do a bin Laden operation."

"The reality is, the cuts that are taking place are going to inhibit our ability to respond in every area. We are sending the world a message that the United States is going to be weaker," he said.

"That's the wrong message to send to this kind of world where we face the troubles we face today."

http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/pentagon-chief-sounds-alarm-over-us-budget-cuts-447081

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

The Slow Death Of Defense

By Robert D. Kaplan / 10/31/2013

Washington - The bottom may be starting to fall out of the U.S. defense budget. I do not refer to numbers when I say this. I am not interested in numbers. I am only interested in public support for those numbers.

For decades since Pearl Harbor, the American public has firmly and quietly acquiesced to a robust military presence around the globe in defense of freedom. The Japanese attack on the U.S. Navy in Hawaii in 1941 shocked the public into the immediate need to defeat the Axis powers. Then the Cold War reigned for 44 years following World War II — ignited in the public mind by the Korean War. Because Communism represented such a demonstrable ideological and geopolitical threat, even those who were ordinarily isolationist put aside their reservations and henceforth became committed to a big army, a big navy, and a big air force. True, after the Cold War there was an urge towards reduced defense budgets, manifested during the Clinton presidency. But 9/11 revealed that as but a brief interlude. The defense budget thus skyrocketed during the younger Bush administration.

But now the world is changing in a number of ways that do not obviously argue for such a robust defense. Notice, I used the word "obviously." Certainly, defense needs are pressing, but they are becoming so in a somewhat subtle and obscure way. Thus, the public is having a hard time being convinced.

For example, defense experts understand the importance of "presence" — that is, having enough warships and fighter jets in a region to reinforce American diplomacy, reassure allies and deter possible adversaries such as the Chinese. But the public may ask: Well, if there is no obvious and direct threat to the United States, couldn't we reduce the numbers of those ships and planes a bit — or more than a bit?

And by the way, the public may also ask: Just why do we need a big army? After all, we're not going to fight anymore of those stupid wars in the Middle East. Actually, we might need a big army for an occupation of part of North Korea, if the regime there ever unraveled. But that is the kind of hypothetical example the public would naturally be skeptical about.

Of course, the public may not like the idea of a radical regime such as Iran's getting a nuclear weapon. Thus, the public may countenance an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities at some stage if negotiations fail. But if that attack ever involved more than just firing missiles from offshore for longer than, say, a week, the public could easily turn against the White House. And a war against Iran might require a campaign lasting many weeks, with many unintended consequences.

The American public just has never been enthusiastic about great military crusades unless the threat against the homeland is concrete and immediate. Policy intellectuals sometimes talk breezily about how Americans are willing to sacrifice. No! A democratic public, in fact, hates sustained sacrifice unless it involves its own core self-interest.

Indeed, humanitarian interventionists have been confronting this very dilemma for two decades now. Remember, the public tolerated humanitarian interventions in the Balkans even as it was never enthusiastic about them. And it tolerated them only because there were no American casualties. Once casualties mounted in Iraq, and Afghanistan looked increasingly like a stalemate, public support for those wars dropped precipitously.

In fact, the world may finally be turning into a place where the public sees less and less reason for an overwhelmingly large defense budget.

For instance, if the United States can achieve a rapprochement of sorts with Iran, that will reduce further the public's appetite for military involvement anywhere in the Middle East. And if China enters a period of tumultuous economic and social change, it may begin to look like less of a threat, and that will also lessen the public's willingness to sustain massive defense outlays. Yes, there are unconventional threats like al Qaeda cells in Pakistan, Yemen and other places. But aren't the drones used to hunt such terrorists a lot cheaper than manned aircraft? And, again, how does this justify all those aircraft carriers and B-2 bombers? Such is how the public may think.

The public, in short, wants protection on the cheap. It may not necessarily be willing to police the world with a big navy and a big air force at least to the degree that it has in the past — that is, unless a clear and demonstrable conventional threat can be identified.

The elites respond by saying that chaos anywhere threatens America's liberal vision of the globe, and there isn't just chaos here and there; indeed it is all over the Greater Middle East. The public is not convinced. The calls and emails to Congress when it was considering military action in Syria overwhelmingly carried the following message:Syria is tragic, and the regime there probably used chemical weapons. But how does this directly impact the homeland? In other words, the public may have had enough of elite nostrums regarding humanitarian causes and projecting power. Pearl Harbor, the Cold War, 9/11 were all extraordinary occurrences that the public viscerally understood, and thus it consented to years of extraordinary defense outlays. But what if nothing of that magnitude happens in the foreseeable future? What if it's just the slow, steady drip of more chaos, more atrocities, more Chinese warships in the Pacific and Indian oceans? In that case, the policy elite will be energized, but not necessarily the public.

The public is not stupid. To be sure, the public harbors a pitch-perfect common sense that the policy elites often lack, even if the public cannot articulate it well. Of course, there are significant elements of the public that are vaguely isolationist, especially within the Republican Party (and to a lesser extent on the anti-war left). But that isolationism is itself a manifestation of America's own continental geography: the awareness that the physical position of the United States naturally protects it from much of the mayhem in Eurasia. Thus, the public sets a high bar for military intervention, which is eminently commonsensical. So if the public is softening on support for high defense budgets, maybe the policy elites need to listen more closely to what the public has to say. So many of the elites wanted to do something about Syria. Well, the American people collectively shook their heads and answered, Are you kidding?
 
Present and future threats are both insidious and less obvious than at any time in the past. The very interconnectedness of the world and technology's defeat of distance makes the oceans less of a barrier to the American mainland than ever before. But the elites have to do a much better job of explaining this to the public. And the armed services especially have to do a much better job of explaining to a skeptical public just why they are needed as much as ever in the past. To wit, air and naval platforms, because they take many years to design and build, require the necessary funding even when no obvious threat is on the horizon.

Indeed, democratic publics, with all their common sense, are nevertheless compulsively obsessed with momentary emotions — especially in an age of incessant polling — and are therefore less wise in planning for future contingencies.

So the armed services and the elites must explain why armies are required for emergencies — which periodically happen; and why navies and air forces are required for guarding the sea-lanes and thus essential for preserving the global system, upon which America depends.

Defense no longer constitutes a free ride where epic events automatically secure big budgets. The public will henceforth demand deep and lucid explanations

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stratfor/2013/10/31/the-slow-death-of-defense/2/

Zeewier

Voor wie nu nog op is. John Kerry live in debat met de Amerikaanse senaat inzake een Syrische interventie:

http://www.c-span.org/Live-Video/C-SPAN/

dudge

Voor wie nog denkt dat alle politieke besluiten in volste oprechtheid worden genomen:

Congresswomen's Voicemail: Where's My Bribe?

Elzenga

Citaat van: Thomasen op 01/03/2013 | 09:55 uur
Gelukkig is zo'n twee partijen stelsel zo lekker overzichtelijk  :crazy:
;D

dudge

Citaat van: Ros op 03/03/2013 | 14:29 uur
Natuurlijk.......bedenk eens hoeveel geld deze ingrepen opleveren. De helft van onze totale Defensiebudget voor een jaar  :cute-smile:

Wat bedoel je?

Ros

Citaat van: Thomasen op 03/03/2013 | 14:25 uur
Citaat van: Ros op 03/03/2013 | 14:23 uur
Wie had dit een jaar geleden durven voorspellen. De Amerikaanse Defensie word gedwongen een paar van de eigen tanden te trekken........

Ach, ze houden er nog steeds een hoop over. Vormt allemaal geen echt probleem.

Natuurlijk.......bedenk eens hoeveel geld deze ingrepen opleveren. De helft van onze totale Defensiebudget voor een jaar  :cute-smile:

dudge

Citaat van: Ros op 03/03/2013 | 14:23 uur
Wie had dit een jaar geleden durven voorspellen. De Amerikaanse Defensie word gedwongen een paar van de eigen tanden te trekken........

Ach, ze houden er nog steeds een hoop over. Vormt allemaal geen echt probleem.

Ros

Wie had dit een jaar geleden durven voorspellen. De Amerikaanse Defensie word gedwongen een paar van de eigen tanden te trekken........

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

3/1/2013

After Sequester, Defense Contractors Try to Assess Damage

By Sandra I. Erwin

The Navy in coming weeks will be taking four of its 10 air wings out of service. The Air Force will cut back flying hours. The Army will restrict training only to combat units that are headed to Afghanistan. Civilian Pentagon employees will receive furlough notices within a month.

Those are some of the immediate consequences of the automatic budget cuts that are now the law of the land, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said March 1 during his first Pentagon news conference.

For military contractors, it could be weeks or months before the damage from sequestration can be fully estimated. But there is no doubt that sequestration "will affect the private sector," Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale said in an interview with Bloomberg Government "Capitol Gains."

Big weapons contracts "will be cut back," said Hale. "They won't be canceled, but they will have to be cut back."

The sequester requires across-the-board cuts of $85 billion — $43 billion for the Defense Department, $29 billion for nondefense agencies and $13 billion for Medicare and other social programs — by Sept. 30. Defense reductions will affect about two-thirds of the Pentagon's $648 billion 2013 budget. Military personnel accounts are protected.

A Feb. 27 memo from Office of Management and Budget Controller Danny Werfel to executive branch chiefs said agencies will have considerable discretion to decide what programs to cut or delay. Once those decisions are made, Werfel said, agencies should inform contractors as soon as possible.

For the remainder of the fiscal year, the government will not be entering into new contracts or exercising options on existing contracts unless they "support high priority initiatives," OMB said.

In the defense sector, service contractors will feel the pain immediately, whereas weapons manufacturers will take the hit more gradually, as the cuts filter down the food chain, said John F. Cooney, a government contracting attorney and partner at Venable LLP.

Cooney, who worked on the implementation of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings sequestration in 1986, said industry should brace for more uncertainty. "There will be little advance public disclosure of which specific contracts will be cut and on what schedule," Cooney said. "That information will be provided to contractors on an individual basis by the contracting officers, as they are given their instructions from above."

Compared to the 1986 sequester, the current one is not only significantly larger in terms of sheer dollar amounts, but also in the way cuts are allocated. Because it was the height of the Cold War, President Reagan protected the bulk of defense spending, Cooney noted.

Pentagon officials said they are still hopeful that they will get some relief from the sequester by March 27, when the temporary budget resolution for fiscal year 2013 expires and Congress is expected to negotiate terms for an extension.

Contractors are not going to know precisely which programs will stay and which will go until agencies' senior policy leaders have had a chance to analyze their priorities, Cooney said. The Defense Department is conducting 2,500 separate sequestration analyses for each of the 2,500 line items in its budget.

In April, the government would begin to issue furlough notices for civilian employees and contractors could start sending layoff warnings to workers. That will "increase the anxiety level of everyone involved in the government contracting process, but will provide companies little in the way of actionable information about whether their contracts are on the chopping block," said Cooney.

The uncertainty could last for weeks or months, as agencies, technically, do not have to make the required cuts until September 30. Although the longer they wait, the more pronounced the cuts will have to be toward the end of the fiscal year.

Cooney speculated that the Defense Department and other agencies will sequence their reductions so that many of the cuts will occur after April 1, in the hope that Congress will turn off or reduce the scope of their sequester obligations by March 27. "The bill providing appropriations for the second half of fiscal year 2013 would provide a logical vehicle for suspending or further deferring the sequestration," Cooney said.

"The Department of Defense is explicitly advocating a strategy in which Congress would use the continuing resolution to modify or abolish the sequester," he said. The steps to implement sequestration that the Pentagon has announced are timed not to have their most significant impact until April, in order to "afford Congress and the White House the maximum time to act before the cuts really start to bite."

The conventional wisdom is that small and medium-size contractors will bear the brunt of the financial impact from sequestration. As a result, there could be a wave of industry mergers, acquisitions and even bankruptcies, said Edward H. Tillinghast, a partner in the finance and bankruptcy practice group at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP.

"If contractor revenues and profits are cut, they'll seek consolidation," he said.

The biggest problem for companies now is not being able to make accurate projections or to plan for the future, he said, adding: "The uncertainty is not good for business. ... Nobody has a good picture of where sequestration will most affect."

Executives and analysts will make educated judgments but "nobody has any real confidence in those projections" because of the political stalemate over government spending, said Tillinghast. In recent conversations with Wall Street insiders, he said, the consensus was that the stock market has not reacted negatively to sequestration yet because the market is not sure what "normal" means anymore, he said. After the 2008 crash, "normal is a fairly volatile concept."

With regard to cuts in government spending, the market will wait and see what happens, and deal with events as they come, Tillinghast said. The obvious truth is that nobody knows the exact impact, he said. "It's going to take some number of weeks and months to sort it out."

A similar conclusion was expressed by industry consultant Michael S. Lewis, of the Silverline Group. "We believe the operating environment will remain very volatile as program offices stay sidelined from normalized procurement activities," he wrote in an email to clients. "Until program offices see budgetary visibility within their areas of responsibility, award flow will remain at the current, below average levels."

Other analysts believe that the hand wringing in the defense sector over sequestration has been overplayed. "It's been positively theatrical," said Gordon Adams, professor of foreign policy at American University and a former Office of Management and Budget official.

The impact on government civilians and service contractors, indeed, will be abrupt, Adams said March 1 during a National Security Network Conference call. For weapons suppliers, "it will be a slope."

Adams is skeptical that Congress will reverse the sequester when it tackles the 2013 budget resolution in late March. That would require both the House and Senate to waive a truckload of rules that govern budget making. "If you don't want sequester, you have to change the way Congress makes budget," he said. "That gets really complicated. ... It is a quite a procedural mountain to climb to use the continuing resolution to fix the sequester."

Lawmakers' "casual attitude" on the day sequester took effect also bodes badly for any chance of reversal, he said. "It's hard to see where the energy will come from."

That said, he added, "It is enormously unpredictable what will happen in the next five to six weeks."

Todd Harrison, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said that much of the anticipated chaos could have been prevented had the Pentagon been better prepared. The sequester has been in the books since August 2011, when Congress passed the Budget Control Act, and yet the Defense Department did not start making contingency plans until November 2012, Harrison said. Defense officials reckoned that making cuts ahead of the sequester would be a self-fulfilling prophesy, and their gamble did not pay off, said Harrison. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's bombastic rhetoric about sequestration being a doomsday device that will turn the United States into a "second-rate power," he suggested, distracted the department from preparing to cope with the cuts.

Hagel will not be embracing Panetta's apocalyptic turns of phrase. He told reporters March 1 that the U.S. military has the world's "best fighting force" and that budget cuts would not change that. "This is the security of the United States of America that we're talking about," he said. "We will do what is necessary."

The challenge for the defense sector will be to get through the next two years, which will be messy, said Harrison. Budget reductions are mandated in 2013 and 2014, but the long-term forecast shows defense spending staying flat or slightly rising between 2015 and 2021. The current drawdown is expected to reduce defense spending overall by about 20 percent from its 2010 peak. That would be a "relatively mild" drop compared to previous post-war declines in military spending, Harrison said.

Industry groups are still holding out hope for a last-minute deal. "Despite our extreme disappointment that sequestration was not averted, we are by no means giving up the fight," Aerospace Industries Association President and CEO Marion C. Blakey said in a news release. March 27 is the "next major opportunity for Congress and President Obama ... to put a stop to the damage that sequestration is doing to our country."

It had been assumed since the sequester was introduced in 2011 — as a mechanism to force a budget deal — that the defense industry would have enough political clout to make it go away. When it became clear that sequestration would happen, outside observers expressed surprise that military contractors were rather powerless to stop the cuts. "If the defense industry was unable to prevent the sequester, maybe it's not the political behemoth we make it out to be," energy blogger David Roberts tweeted March 1.

http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=1071#.UTNJ6J2XzSw.twitter



dudge

Gelukkig is zo'n twee partijen stelsel zo lekker overzichtelijk  :crazy:

jurrien visser (JuVi op Twitter)

vr 01 mrt 2013

Sequester Day Rob Koenders

AMSTERDAM - De Dow Jones faalde gisteren in de eerste echte poging op de laatste handelsdag van de maand februari om tot een nieuw All Time High record te komen. De index steeg gisteren tot op 16 punten onder de hoogste absolute recordstand van oktober 2007 van 14.164 punten. De Dow Jones computer gestuurde koopopdracht tot de top is volbracht. Realisme en rationalisme kunnen terugkeren op Wall Street.

Wall Street is in de afgelopen maanden en jaren erg goed weggekomen met het gratis geld van Fed-voorzitter Bernanke, maar 'Main Street', de man en vrouw in de straten van Amerika, zal vanaf vandaag ook de negatieve gevolgen gaan ondervinden van het eerste automatische bezuinigingsprogramma wat in de komende 10 jaar $1200 miljard aan uitgavenverminderingen en lastenverzwaringen zal doorvoeren.

Amerika en de Amerikaanse politiek kende het woord bezuinigen eigenlijk niet. Men ging er altijd van uit dat met nog meer geld en economische groei wel automatisch schuldenrductie zou worden gerealiseerd. Amerika staat aan de vooravond van vele programma's van jarenlange bezuinigingen en hervormingen, wil men toekomstige generaties niet opzadelen met astronomische schulden en tekorten. Europa en de eurozone worden gegeseld door de politiek, de verwende Amerikanen kunnen er ook niet aan ontkomen.

De Amerikaanse Senaat ondernam gisteren een allerlaatste poging om het vandaag te starten sequester af te wenden,  maar er kwam geen meerderheid, waarna Wall Street alle winst verloor en met verlies de dag uitging.  Niets lijkt meer een begin van de automatische bezuinigingen voor een eerste bedrag van $85 miljard voor de komende 7 maanden nog tegen te kunnen houden. De Amerikanen moeten wel, want het begrotingstekort voor dit jaar wordt geraamd op $1000 miljard.

De Amerikaanse president Obama ontmoet vandaag in de loop van de dag de leiders van Republikeinen en Democraten van zowel Het Huis van Afgevaardigden als ook de Senaat om de gevolgen van het sequester te bespreken. Als zoals verwacht de Amerikaanse toppolitici en de president geen oplossing kunnen bereiken, zal Obama direct een order tekenen met een opdracht aan overheidsinstellingen om de bezuinigingen te implementeren.

Er zal dan een begin worden gemaakt met het langzamerhand uitrollen van de beoogde bezuinigingen op overheidsuitgaven die met name defensie, onderwijs en transportzaken zullen raken. Honderdduizenden banen staan op de tocht en het publiek zal de gevolgen merken doordat er minder personeel beschikbaar is voor afhandeling van de meest simpele overheidstaken.

President Obama waarschuwde dat vermindering op de defensie-uitgaven de veiligheid van Amerika kan aantasten. Er zullen mogelijk lange rijen ontstaan op vliegvelden en andere overheidsloketten doordat minder personeel hetzelfde werk moet doen. De onvrede onder de bevolking zal langzamerhand verder toenemen, zo wordt verwacht. Bezuinigingen zullen vanaf vandaag ook in Amerika worden doorgevoerd. Amerika ontkomt er ook niet aan want de tekorten zijn ongekend hoog.

Het IMF was er gisteren als één van de eersten bij om te verklaren dat de gevolgen het vandaag in te voeren sequester negatief zullen uitwerken voor de groei van Amerika, maar ook de totale wereld economie kunnen raken. Er zal een negatieve impact komen op de wereldgroei volgens het IMF. Het Amerikaanse BBP zal negatieve gevolgen van het sequester ondervinden. Het IMF stelt dat men de groeiverwachtingen van Amerika zal moeten herevalueren.

Vanuit Italië komt vanochtend het bericht dat de centrumlinkse leider Bersani absoluut niet wil samenwerken in een brede coalitie met het centrumrechtse blok van Berlusconi. Afgelopen woensdag sloot 5-sterren leider Grillo al politieke samenwerking met zowel Bersani als Berlusconi uit zodat per vanochtend de totaal onwerkbare politieke situatie in Italië een feit is.

Er ontstaat een zeer hachelijke situatie nu alle leiders van de partijen die in Italië moeten samenwerken, elke vorm van samenwerking afwijzen.  De eerste reactie op de verkiezingsuitslag was zeer negatief. De verkoopgolf werd niet doorgezet doordat Bernanke Wall Street euforisch maakte door QE3 onveranderd voor de nabije toekomst door te zetten.  Maar een totaal onbestuurbaar land met de derde grootste nationale schuld ter wereld van €2025 miljard die alleen al dit jaar €300 miljard moet herfinancieren. Hoe kan dit goed blijven gaan als alle politiek stilvalt?

Rob Koenders (1961) is directeur van SprinterTips.nl, een website voor de actieve belegger.

http://www.telegraaf.nl/dft/goeroes/robkoenders/21343682/__Sequester_Day__.html