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Debt culture gone awry...

The last days have seen world stock markets a sea of red. Billions of dollars have been wiped off the value of companies around the globe. The horror word is debt - and a fear that the end of the downturn hasn't been reached yet. The potential fallout of all of this is hard to presently gauge.

What we in the West don't read about is how the turbulence of the last days has been viewed in the Middle East.

Hamid Varzi is an economist and banker based in Tehran and in an op-ed piece in the IHT writes:

"The U.S. economy, once the envy of the world, is now viewed across the globe with suspicion. America has become shackled by an immovable mountain of debt that endangers its prosperity and threatens to bring the rest of the world economy crashing down with it.

The ongoing sub-prime mortgage crisis, a result of irresponsible lending policies designed to generate commissions for unscrupulous brokers, presages far deeper problems in a U.S. economy that is beginning to resemble a giant smoke-and-mirrors Ponzi scheme. And this has not been lost on the rest of the world.

This new reality has had unfortunate side effects that go beyond economics. As a banker working in the heart of the Muslim world, I have been amazed by the depth and breadth of anti-Americanism, even among U.S. allies, manifested in reactions ranging from fierce anger to stoic fatalism. Muslims outside the United States interpret America's policies in the Middle East not as an effort to spread democracy but as a blatant neocolonialist attempt to solve its economic problems by force. Arabs and Persians alike argue that America's fiscal irresponsibility has forced the nation to seek solutions through military aggression."

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