The productive economies of the world have largely been waiting for the United States, and its trusted consumer culture, to jump back into international markets and absorb their output. It has generally been assumed that global consumer demand, led by the world’s ultimate consumers, would be a central cog in a collective recovery.

America in 2010 seems simply incapable of leading that consumer charge. Nearly 10 percent of our workforce is out of work, another 10 percent don’t make enough money at the jobs that they do have, and everyone in general is forced to pinch pennies at every turn.

According to The Wall Street Journal, even the most vocal proponent of the “jobless recovery,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, has owned up to the fact that America simply is not what it used to be.

In a private letter to the finance ministers of the G-20, Secretary Geithner expressed his belief that the rest of the world is going to have to step up on their own. For generations major export nations like Germany, Japan, and China have relied on the United States to soak up their goods and drive their economic growth. In the modern economic climate that is simply impossible.

The U.S. still runs enormous and disastrous trade deficits, but they have been much smaller in the post-collapse years of 2008 and 2009. Using projections from the first half of the year our trade deficit for 2010 will fall once again. All of this means that Germany, Japan, and China have less American money to play with and more that they have to do on their own.

Secretary Geithner outlined the necessity in American consumers saving more and spending less, and the necessity for foreign consumers to pick up where Americans left off.

This is perhaps one of the most overlooked facets of the global downturn. So much of the world economy was based on Americans buying anything and everything they could. We bought new electronics, cars, clothing, food, etc., from factories overseas and were a driving force for global expansion.

Unfortunately, we funded all of these purchases with financing and credit lines that were destroyed in the 2007-2009 market collapse. Now, the rest of the world is being asked to figure out how to fund their own domestic expansion without stealing tens of billions of dollars each month from the American economy. If the downturn in Europe is any indication, the rest of the world is not doing a great job at it.

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