By Mark Bloome, Founder of TAP America

As our world has grown smaller and interconnection greater, we will be affected by the ‘getting worse by the day’ situation in Europe.

Put simply, many of the European governments have spent too much money and cannot bring down their debts. No matter what austerity measures they take their economies and their work forces are uncompetitive.

These countries include Greece, Italy, and Spain. Even France is having its share of problems.

Not unlike the USA, the political situation in these countries is divisive and the people do not want to deal with the hardships of austerity and politicians in those countries deceive the voters pretending they have a painless solution.

Also plaguing these countries is that tax avoidance, tax bribery, and off the books transactions have hindered adequate tax collections to pay down their debts.

Two reasons why should we care about this:

• Imports and exports.  We export goods to Europe and if they are in a recession/depression then they cannot buy our goods.  Further as their economies decline their currency, called the euro, will go down in value making European imports cheaper and costing American jobs.

• We do not know how interconnected our banks are with European banks.  There are transactions going on all the time such as ‘derivatives’, which are defined as; contracts, whose value is derived from that of other quantities.  Derivatives are written by financial institutions such as banks and investment bankers and are hidden from public view.

They were a substantial part of the problem when our economy collapsed in 2008. We do not know how much American banks are tied into European banks through loans and derivatives.

Due to the stand off in D.C.  we have done little to make visible if our financial institutions have either made loans to European banks and businesses or to make visible if they have been involved in derivatives.

America needs to turn inward and buy our own products.  We cannot go backwards into the ‘good old glory days’ as the world has substantially changed and so has our country.  We need to take care of our own country and at the same time maintain our freedom through diplomacy and a strong military.