Invest in Romania!

Sarcastic investment advice was being published yesterday in the American media:

"Invest in Asia and in the better led countries of Latin America and keep a decent chunk of your money in gold, because you"re going to need it".

The warning is justified by noticing the discrepancy between the predictions of the CBO (Congressional Budget Office - a federal agency which provides Congress with economic data, together with other institutions of the Government) and the claim of president Barack Obama and of the members of the Congress that raising the debt ceiling will lower the national debt.

Of course, the first discrepancy that should be noted is one that is logical: one can"t lower the national debt by going even further into debt.

But beyond common sense comes the knowledge of the leaders, who sometimes resort to various tricks to postpone the bankruptcy, until the economy recovers.

On this level which overlaps with common sense, those arguing against raising the debt ceiling consider that the decision was a mistake, and even more, it will lead to an increase of the current debt of 14 trillion dollars, to 23 trillion dollars in ten years.

This calculation reports that the Plan drawn up by Congress proposes reducing expenses by just 917 billion dollars for a period of 10 years and furthermore, a special commission was set up to find ways to cut expenses by an additional 1,500 billion by November.

The objection is that savings will amount to just 2,500 billion over ten years, while considering the fact that president Obama added 4,000 billion dollars to the national debt in just a few years of his mandate.

"How can one make any progress in terms of fixing the debt issue, when one keeps adding new liabilities, of four billion dollars a day?", the opponents of the budget plan are asking.

They say that things are even gloomier, and that according to the CBO, the alleged savings of 2,500 billion dollars are evaporating rapidly due to inflation and because of the economic output lost, but, if the slowdown of the American economy in the first semester of 2011 becomes a long term reality, then the deficit will completely spin out of control: "In theory, the deficit will increase by 9,170 billion dollars in 2012-2021, but basically, the debt will evolve into a spiral, the credit rating of the US will go to hell, and the economic collapse will be unavoidable".

The solutions which are being proposed are relatively impossible and apocalyptic: without subsidies for biofuel, without deductions for mortgages, without charitable deductions, measures which at any rate can not be implemented before 2013, due to the legal timing of the fiscal regime.

At this point, the sarcasm of recommending investing in countries with better management of Latin America seems to fade.

It sounds like a serious advice.

Invest in Romania.

It has better management!

The American counterperformance, apparently not even prime minister Emil Boc can match!

And it"s not for lack of trying!...