Seen from afar, the behaviour of America's government over the past month or so has been decidedly odd. Finance ministers visiting the imp and the World Bank on October nth, some of them from countries America has helped rescue in the past, seemed bemused by what was going on in Washington. China's government, which holds the idea that countries ought not to intervene in each others' affairs to be self-evident, criticised America repeatedly for failing to raise the debt ceiling, the legal limit on government borrowing, in a timely manner. Zhu Guangyao, the deputy finance minister, suggested that the Tea Party was to blame, an intervention that drew the somewhat Chinese response to 'stay out of our politics'. Unfortunately, while behaving erratically from time to time can be endearing, doing so repeatedly is a sign of illness. Though a deal to raise the debt ceiling was done at the last minute, America will have to go through this all over again in the new year.
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