Geithner in Saudi: Mission Accomplished, Hard Times Ahead, Sorry About Dubai Ports

Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner spoke today to a not-full room in Jeddah. While the speech ranged through centuries of Gulf history and seemed designed to continue until the Saudi kingdom becomes a republic, it does open a window on current interventionist thinking. Some highlights:

It would be even worse if we weren't here:

The global economy today is going through one of the most challenging periods of economic stress in generations. On every continent, in almost every country, businesses and families have experienced a severe loss of wealth, rising unemployment, business failure.

But the policies, the economic policies that have been put in place here in the kingdom, in the region, in the United States and around the world have helped contain the crisis. It helped arrest the crisis, slowing the pace of decline in economic growth, pulling the global financial system back from the edge of failure and establishing the basis for economic recovery.

The force of the global recession is now receding, and the IMF and a range of private analysts are starting to revise up their forecasts for growth in the second half of the year and next year, and global trade is now starting to expand again.