leave debt. and sometimes if your only approach is cutting spending at a time when the economy s contracting, then the economy will contract further and that can add debt. now the advantage we had is that the dollar is the reserve currency of the world. even in the midst of crisis people were still buying u.s. treasury bills. we were not part of a broader arrangement like the eurozone so it gave us some additional flexibility, but the key lesson that we ve drawn from our experience, and it s true that we recovered faster and better, frankly, than most of europe is that particularly when the economy is still struggling,