Ruben Alvarez
Professor Salmon Namala
Macroeconomics 201
16 May 2015
Outline
Main Points

1) America the Relatively Beautiful
The bow-tie-wearing president of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, told a story in Davos about a young Estonian inventor he invited to tea in the summer of 2011 who told him he was moving to the U.S. in two weeks to make his fortune. His name is Hardi Meybaum, and he co-founded a computer-aided-design company called GrabCAD. Last fall the now-Boston-based company was sold for $100 million. Said Ilves: “That never would have happened in Europe.”

2) America’s economy booming again
The U.S. economy is booming again—which is one reason President Obama devoted much of his State of the Union address to extolling it. “Since 2010,” Obama said, “America has put more people back to work than Europe, Japan, and all advanced economies combined.”The U.S. economy has generated jobs at a pace of a quarter million per month over the past year. The unemployment rate—5.6 percent, the lowest since 2008—is low enough that the Federal Reserve has stopped buying bonds and is making noises about lifting short-term rates this year,

3) How America was able to utilize government intervention to get out of a recession.
President Bush’s Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, engineered a takeover of housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which kept some credit flowing to home buyers. President Obama and his Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, took even more dramatic actions as the crisis deepened in 2009—getting Congress to pass a $787 billion stimulus package and saving General Motors and Chrysler from being dismembered in bankruptcy court.

4) America’s economy affect the world’s economy/other countries’ economies
. If the U.S. hopes to sustain its growth, let alone improve on it, then the world’s other economies need to