“When Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner crashed a gathering of European finance officials in Poland last week, his suggestions were generally ignored, and his very presence at the confab was mocked. Now, this wasn’t the first time an American venturing into Europe will be met with something other than open arms. (I frequently wonder if there is a word for “hospitality” in the Swiss dialect of German). On the one hand, an American policymaker presuming to lecture others about how to handle a debt problem in the fall of 2011 would be a little like a Russian nuclear official holding forth on nuclear plant safety a few months after the Chrenobyl debacle. American banks distributed subprime bonds throughout the world, the failure of institutions from Lehman to AIG helped cause a global economic meltdown, and the U.S. sports trillion-dollar plus deficits that are paralyzing its political system.”