Carlo de Benedetti, Chairman, Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso/La Repubblica, will deliver the 2009 Reuters Memorial Lecture on ‘Newspapers and Democracy in the Internet era: The Italian Case’.

The Reuters Memorial Lecture commemorates journalists who have lost their lives in pursuit of their profession.

The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion chaired by John Lloyd, with Timothy Garton Ash and Paolo Mancini. Reuters correspondents will be live blogging throughout.

To join the discussion click on the ‘make a comment’ link at the top of the liveblog panel.

Welcome to our live coverage of the 1pound40 conference, a joint endeavour by Reuters and the Amplified network which brings together users of Twitter to discuss the idea that social media has evolved to the point that it can help solve real world problems.

Attendees will also be discussing whether the power of Twitter can be harnessed to improve the news and help re-engage a jaded electorate with the political process.

You can read more details about the conference and who is attending on our original blog post. We will be bringing you minute-by-minute highlights from the discussion (including video, audio and pictures) on the potential for social media. But you don’t have to be there to contribute — leave a comment on the blog below if you have something you want to say. To track the conversation about the event then follow the 1pound40 hashtag on Twitter.

You can also check out this Twitter list set up by delegates and contributors or follow an unmoderated stream of this on a second live blog on the right hand side of this page. Finally, you can also follow a visualisation of proceedings in this ‘conversation cloud’.

Last week I was told that Reuters has lost its ethical bearings. You've sacrificed the sacred tenet of accuracy by rushing to publish information without checking if it is true. Your credibility has suffered, the value of your brand will wither and the service you offer to clients has been devalued, I heard.

It was a meaty accusation, especially as it came in the midst of a debate on ethics in journalism held at the London home of ThomsonReuters, the parent of the Reuters news organisation. The charge came from former Reuters journalists and a senior member of the trustees body that monitors Reuters compliance with its core ethical principles.

So what specifically were we being accused of and what defence did I offer?

On the 8th anniversary of the Sept 11th attacks, a day of more than normal sensitivity to security matters, CNN in the United States reported that the U.S. Coast Guard had fired on a boat in the Potomac River in Washington D.C. President Obama was visiting the nearby Pentagon at the time. Reuters rushed out a story on the reports of gunfire, citing CNN as the source for the information, while urgently checking with law enforcement officials. It transpired that CNN had been monitoring radio traffic on an unencrypted Marine frequency and had overheard a training exercise in which crew members shouted 'bang bang'. Quickly we put out an update to our story making clear it was a false alarm.

I had played a part in crafting our policy on handling such stories and from my place on the debate panel I offered another example for the audience to chew on.  On Oct. 21 Britain's Sky News reported that the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi had died in Libya. We put out a story, sourced to Sky News and repeating how it said it had the information of the death, while checking with officials and al-Megrahi's legal team in Scotland. We quickly established that Sky had it wrong and updated our story to say so.

It is grating for any journalist to publish information that turns out to be incorrect. Even if we can say that the original error was made elsewhere some of the flak hits those who replicate the mistake. After all, those who republish a libel are as liable for it as its originator. 

So why did we not check first and publish later? 

The answer goes to the heart of how the news business has changed, how the notion of authoritativeness has altered and how Reuters journalists interpret the values they live by.

But first let's scotch one myth. Embarrassing publicity notwithstanding, it is relatively rare for Reuters to publish what turns out to be an erroneous report by another news organisation. Since we instituted our current policy on 'pick-ups,' as they are known in the trade, the level of 'echoed mistakes,' has neither grown nor fallen.  

To provide a complete service to our customers our policy is to pick up stories of significance that are being carried by normally reliable media that are in a position to know what they are reporting.   Hence the decision to quote CNN, which has a good record on reporting its own home turf, or Sky, which has broken news on the Lockerbie bomber story and follows it closely.  We protect our reputation by carefully acknowledging the source of the information and speedily checking its veracity. And hundreds of times every day Reuters journalists decline to go with a story running on local media because it 'smells' wrong, is trivial, or both. Mostly that decision is vindicated. The old school would have it that our policy is a failure of journalism. Yet walking the right line between publishing everything and publishing nothing actually requires a finer exercise of judgment. Better journalism, in other words. 

The counter-argument is that we should only publish when we have 100 percent certainty from our own sources.  That may be possible for a news organisation with a longer publishing timescale, such as a newspaper, or a periodical magazine. Yet even they, with online arms that are increasingly as 'real-time' as Reuters, the Associated Press or Bloomberg, face the same challenges of dealing with fast-breaking stories as the news agencies.  With the advent of the Internet has come a cacophony of online voices that amplify and accelerate information, frequently dropping reference to where it originated or how it first became known. In that environment readers look to news services like Reuters to tell them what is known, and how it is known, with clarity and speed, regardless of whether we originated the story or not. In a complex, fast-moving world, no news organisation, no matter how well-resourced, can be first to report everything. All of us target the news we want to break and rely on others, who are sometimes allies and sometimes competitors, to paint their part of the picture.   

Has our approach destroyed the relationship of trust that our clients and readers have with us?    

The question supposes there was once a golden age of authoritative journalism where sourcing was always rigorous and the pursuit of truth always relentless. History suggests otherwise. Current anxiety over journalistic values is often a proxy for broader worry over the health of the media industry. Declining revenues have driven cost cutting that has threatened, many feel, the standards of journalism. Reuters is stressing speed for fear of losing its audience, critics say, and will do so at the expense of its reputation for accuracy.  

Yet our business has always put a premium on speed, and given that we are one of very few global news organisations that is expanding its staff during the downturn we feel we are doing the right things to maintain our audience.

The nature of authority in the news business has also changed. Real-time readers understand breaking news is contingent, uncertain and provisional. Exclusivity evaporates fast as aggregators, citers and plagiarists disseminate the fruits of others' reporting toil. Respect is won by breaking news and by operating with clear rules and standards. But it also come from guiding readers carefully to the reports of others, binding the audience in with compelling packages of conversation, illumination and curated content.

When the first plane hit the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, Reuters did not put out a story instantly. We were so mesmerised by the unbelievability of the event, and so uncertain over how to handle what we saw on CNN, that we froze. How many readers were lost that day and how many on the day of the Potomac gun battle that never was?

If you think that tweets are the mindless outpourings of those with more time than sense then this one’s not for you. But if you’re curious about how social media is increasingly influencing key areas of public policy then read on.

Reuters and the Amplified network are bringing together users of Twitter to discuss the idea that social media has evolved to the point that it can help solve real world problems.

Twitter’s role in transmitting news has been demonstrated numerous times, with its role in the Mumbai bombings last year and June’s post-election protests in Iran just two examples. But can that power be harnessed to improve the news?

Twitter’s seemingly effortless ability to mobilise citizen concern has been illustrated by the #welovenhs tag used at the height of the debate in the US over universal health care provision and more recently by the overturning of the super-injunction banning the reporting of the Trafigura case. But can social media go further and help re-engage a jaded electorate with the political process?

We’ll be debating the potential for social media in these and other public policy areas in London on November 11th. If you’d like to come apply for tickets via eventbrite (you’ll need a Twitter id to register and be warned -  this is not a listening event but a highly participatory one.) If you’ve got a suggestion for a real world problem that could do with some help from social media then let us know via the comments below. To track the conversation about the event then follow the 1pound40 tag on Twitter. And we’ll be updating this post with more details including live coverage plans for those who want to contribute via social media.

Update: BBC Director of Global News Richard Sambrook (@sambrook) will act as the catalyst for the conversation on Twitter and News, and Conservative MP Nadine Dorries (@nadinedorries) will be doing likewise for Politics and Twitter (Commons business permitting).

Kerry McCarthy MP (Labour) who had hoped to come but can’t make it has left us with this challenge:

I've been building up a couple of dummy funds on Reuters' new Portfolio tool. Not only is it a welcome diversion from actual work, but it allows me to test the mettle of the fund managers we speak to, and check out the guidance offered by the Lipper Leader fund rankings.

One of my portfolios uses the stock picks and short ideas offered up by the managers we interview for the many FUND VIEW stories which dot the Reuters wire. The other simply picks some of the funds which score highest across the Lipper fund sectors.

In theory, it gives me ample room to lay blame elsewhere when the dummy funds inevitably go belly up and I'm forced into a fire sale of assets to repay my dummy investors with dummy money. In truth though, I'm going to set the asset weightings and decide when to buy and sell so any abject failures will be more fairly laid at my door.

The early results, in fact, are pretty encouraging.

The Fund Viewer stock picking portfolio has delivered me a comforting 8 percent return since I put it up on Sept 25 (my wedding anniversary -- must be a good omen) and that's with a ridiculously cautious 36-percent weighting in cash, as well as some equally ridiculous single-stock exposures caused by misreading the denominations. (That little 'p' is pence folks, big 'P' is pounds)

My Fund Leaders fund of funds has even less of a track record, but has still managed close to 2 percent returns since Oct 6.

Both funds are outperforming the FTSE Europtop 100 index, my chosen benchmark, by more than 18 percent on a three-month view. I've not exactly been scientific about choosing the index, but fortunately my dummy investors have notoriously poor due diligence standards.

Get on to the portfolio page, see if you show up my performance record as a painful underachievement, and try to top the Reuters Portfolio league.

Doubtless the FSA would like me to point out that the value of investments can go down as well as up. Mind you, anyone not conversant with that little peccadillo of the markets has either been asleep for the last year and a half or houses a memory so short-term they may well have forgotten the first half of this paragraph anyway.

The demise of Lehman Brothers a year ago sparked a collapse in financial market confidence and set of a series of reactions that have spread hardship into the four corners of the globe.

Reuters News has charted the key events and their impact in "Times of Crisis" -- a major new multimedia production on Reuters.com. (See it here.)

We'd like to add the experiences of Reuters readers. So, if you or your family have been affected by the events of the past year then use the comments section below to share your story.

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

The first entry is abattoir (not abbatoir); the last is ZULU (a term used by Western military forces to mean GMT).

In between are 2,211 additional entries in the A-to-Z general style guide, part of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, which we are now making available online. Also included in the handbook are sections on standards and values; a guide to operations; a sports style guide and a section of specialised guidance on such issues as personal investments by journalists, dealing with threats and complaints and reporting information found on the internet.

The handbook is the guidance Reuters journalists live by -- and we're proud of it. Until now, it hasn't been freely available to the public. In the early 1990s, a printed handbook was published and in 2006 the Reuters Foundation published a relatively short PDF online that gave some basic guidance to reporters. But it's only now that we're putting the full handbook online.

We've decided to make the handbook available to everyone for a number of reasons. Among them:

• Transparency: At a time when trust is an endangered commodity in the financial and media worlds, it's important that news consumers see the guidelines our journalists follow.
• Service: As we've seen over the past decade, the barriers to publishing have dropped so that anyone with an idea and a computer can be a publisher. But it's also become clear that publishers have a varying standard of truth, fairness and style. Our handbook is a good place for budding journalists to begin.
• Geography: Reuters serves a global audience and the handbook recognises the cultural and political differences that our journalists face in reporting for the world. This is a handbook not just for English-language journalists in the United Kingdom or the United States, but for wherever English is used.

Many entries deal with words that are sometimes confused or misused. Turning randomly to the "H" section, we learn the difference between hyperthermia and hypothermia (The latter means "Too cold. Think that o rhymes with low" while the former means "Too hot. Think of 'er' as in very."); Haarlem and Harlem (the latter is in New York City, the former in the Netherlands); hangar and hanger (the latter is for clothes, the former a shelter for aircraft); and hale and hail (the former means "free from disease, or to pull or haul by force." The latter "is to salute or call out, or an ice shower").

We take a global approach to the spelling of many words. Often, it's the United States against the world. For instance, our preferred style is "artefact," except in the U.S., where it's artifact. Same goes for axe and axeing -- our standards for most of the world -- which become ax and axing in the U.S. There's also "backwards," which loses its "s" in American stories, and "leukaemia," which loses that first "a" in the U.S. There's plenty more: tyre and tire, titbit and tidbit, and defence and defense.

In the world of diplomacy, economics and academe, the G3 is Germany, Japan and the U.S.; the G5 extends membership to France and the U.K.; G7 grows the club to Canada and Italy; make it G8 with Russia; G10 adds Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden. As for the G24, G30 and G77, you'll have to look for yourself (we've got entries for them, too).

There are slang words to avoid (posh -- though one former Spice Girl might object) and a number of common misspellings (Viet Cong, not Vietcong; ventricle, not ventrical; machinegun, not machine gun; and ketchup, not catchup or catsup).

The sports section of the handbook offers a list of sports cliches to avoid (hard fought, made history, veteran, bounce back, and icon), the difference between a field and a pitch (the former's where American football and baseball are played), and an explanation of delight as a transitive verb that needs an object ("Marat Safin delighted Russian fans with a neat chip...not Marat Safin delighted with a chip."). Words like disaster and tragedy shouldn't be used in sports stories, as this devalues the significance of these words ("Losing a football match is not a disaster. A stand falling down and crushing a fan is").

When language implies a value judgment, we must use words very carefully (cult, for instance: One person's cult is another's religion). The entry for "good, bad" advises: "For financial and commodity markets good news and bad news depends on who you are and what your position is in the market. Avoid them."

One of the most controversial entries is that of "terrorism." The entry reads, in part:

"We may refer without attribution to terrorism and counter-terrorism in general but do not refer to specific events as terrorism. Nor do we use the adjective word terrorist without attribution to qualify specific individuals, groups or events. ... Report the subjects of news stories objectively, their actions, identity and background. Aim for a dispassionate use of language so that individuals, organisations and governments can make their own judgment on the basis of facts. Seek to use more specific terms like “bomber” or “bombing”, “hijacker” or “hijacking”, “attacker” or “attacks”, “gunman” or “gunmen” etc."

This policy has been passionately debated inside and outside Reuters. As  the handbook says, "we aim for dispassionate language" so that our customers can "make their own judgment on the basis of facts."

Reuters Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger puts it this way:

"Over the years we have been criticised for this policy on numerous occasions, when people or governments wanted us to label an incident ourselves rather than quote their views. Criticism of our policy was especially fierce when the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001. Reuters made the decision not to describe the attackers as terrorists, because we thought a label would not add to our vivid description of the thousands of deaths and the destruction of the iconic twin towers of the World Trade Center. In the years since, as the world has witnessed numerous other attacks, we've chosen to continue that policy of sticking with the facts and letting our readers make up their own minds based on our reporting and the evidence we present them."

It's important to point out that the handbook is a living document, one that preserves rules that have guided Reuters journalists through a century and half but also one that may change when the times change.  It's also important to note that the handbook is produced by humans who aren't infallible -- and it's used by humans who aren't infallible, so sometimes we make mistakes. I'm sure you'll let us know when we do, but we're usually harder on ourselves than anyone else is.

I hope you'll find the handbook useful, whether you're a journalist, a student, a teacher or an engaged reader. And we welcome your comments and suggestions.

Update: We’ve closed comments on this post as the Interview is now finished. See Nick’s Twitter stream for further responses to questions and this post for an account of how the event worked.

Video Feed

If you’ve got a question for Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg then now’s your chance: on Monday July 13th (1200 GMT). he’ll be joining the Reuters UK team to take your questions live. And no subject is off limits.

You’ll be able to see the live videostream here and you can ask questions ahead of the event or respond during it by using Twitter (#askclegg) the 12 Seconds video service (nickclegg) or use this post’s comment form below. (We’ll also feature the highlights on the reuters uk news twitterstream.) Nick introduces the event below and, to kick off the discussion, asks a couple of questions of his own.

On Monday we can change the way we do politics. Every week I travel around the country to meet people in their local town halls and listen to their views. Anyone can come along and ask me (just about) anything and in return I get a pretty good picture of how people across the UK feel about politics and how they are being affected by the recession.

Next week I am going to do another of my public Q&A meetings, but this time it is going to be live and online so that you can ask me your questions from home, your work or wherever you happen to be online. There will be no script and no special invitations - just get in touch and ask a question on subjects that concern you.

The one thing that keeps coming up again and again is the state of our politics and how we can clean it up. Many people say they would like to see action taken against MPs who seriously abuse the system. But currently voters have no power to sack those MPs who have been found guilty of serious wrong-doing. I want to change this and make politicians more accountable and politics more transparent. I am keen to hear your ideas.

This has never been done before so, on Monday 13th July post your questions and let’s discuss how we can clean up politics and fix the British economy.

Nick Clegg

Nick Clegg @ Reuters - MPs on 12seconds.tv

Nick Clegg @ Reuters - Bankers on 12seconds.tv

Dean Wright is Global Editor, Ethics, Innovation and News Standards. Any opinions are his own.

Are we too connected?

In recent days and weeks I’ve been wondering if our mobile phones, Blackberries, text messaging and constant access to email and social media have brought us too close together for our own good.

Or maybe the quality of our connected life is only as good as the information we share.

At this point, social media and microblogging phenomena like Facebook and Twitter focus on short answers to such generic questions as, “What are you doing?”

We hear from network and cable television anchors who tell us what they’re having for lunch (often a quick sandwich in the company cafeteria because they are, well, really busy). Or from usually cynical White House journalists who can’t resist Tweeting which B-list celebrity they saw at the White House Correspondents Dinner. Here are a few actual Tweets from the so-called nerd prom:

• "Just spend quality time with ricky schroeder #nerdprom".
• "post #nerdprom sightings. demi/ashton, james franco, owen wilson, eric holder, mayor fente, d axelrod, christopher hitchens, dana delaney". (This one's fitting since Ashton Kutcher is the world's most followed Twitterer).
• "Just got picture with Dule Hill."

Given the quality of the material, it's little wonder that a Nielsen study found that Twitter retained only 40 percent of its new members after a month of use. And that was after Oprah started sharing her 140-character thoughts. Before that it was 30 percent.

But could it be that this “me, me, me” quality of Facebook and Twitter is just an early evolutionary stage of something smarter and more useful? There are some encouraging signs -- and that's a good thing, because we're becoming ever more connected.

How connected are we?

• Facebook has more than 200 million active users and more than 100 million log on at least once a day. More than 3.5 billion minutes a day are spent on Facebook and more than 20 million users update their statuses at least once a day.
• A Nielsen survey found that American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text messages a month in the last quarter of 2008, an astonishing 80 messages a day. That's more than double the previous year's figures and works out to more than three messages an hour -- if they never sleep or go to class.

How connected are we going to be?

• Delta Airlines reported that more than 300 of its aircraft will be equipped with wi-fi this year, enabling email users to stay connected -- or shackled -- to their accounts even seven miles above the earth. Other airlines are closely watching Delta's experience.

Media outlets and other institutions are finding ways to take advantage of this connectivity, moving beyond gossip and gab.

• ProPublica recently introduced Change Tracker, an application that monitors government websites and sends out notices of changes as they are posted via a Twitter feed. Some of the changes are a bit obscure -- "Biography of Millard Fillmore [rare] changed on 5/27" -- but others track changes to the website following the spending of economic stimulus money.
• The Vatican has added an iPhone app to reach out to young, connected people, according to Online Media Daily. Young people "are looking to a different media culture, and this is our effort to ensure that the Church is present in that communications culture," said Monsignor Paul Tighe, secretary of the Vatican's Social Communications department.
• At Reuters, we're using Reuters Messenger to build chat rooms in which our journalists can expand their conversation with the marketplace through informal, dynamic interactions with a group of engaged financial news clients on our terminals.

We're also using Twitter in some intriguing ways:

• Specialist journalists use it to share articles and build up a following.
• Online editorial staff and bloggers use Twitter to distribute news and solicit reader comment.
• Journalists are using Twitter during live events like Davos (Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger used it to break news there earlier this year) and to solicit questions for newsmaker interviews.

There are huge implications for those of us in the news media as we try to reach an increasingly fragmented and distracted audience awash in information, some of it wanted and much of it not.

And journalists who work and live in the digital world (and that’s just about all of us now) will find that there is little or no difference between our professional and private personae in the wide-open world of social media. A visit to my Facebook page, for example, would reveal to my friends that I have a strong interest in horse racing; an affection for the New York Yankees (an obsession, my wife would argue); and take great pleasure in the words and music of Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Townes Van Zandt. What you won't find is an indication of my politics or religion.

Here at Reuters, we are developing guidelines for how our journalists interact with social media.

• If Reuters journalists want to use Twitter or social media as part of their professional role they should seek the permission of their manager.
• If Reuters journalists use Twitter professionally they should use the word "Reuters" in the name of their streams or somewhere else on the page.
• The Trust Principles apply to Twitter and social media -- they should do nothing that compromises them.
• Microblogging and use of social media tend to blur the distinction between professional and personal lives: When using Twitter or social media in a professional capacity our journalists should aim to be personable but not to include irrelevant material about their personal lives.

In an email to the editorial staff, Editor-in-Chief Schlesinger told Reuters journalists, "whether we like it or not, our online identities are inextricably linked with our workplace identities....Things we do online could very easily taint our journalistic activity. If one of us self-identifies as 'very liberal' politically, it may well be the truth, but would advertising it simply feed the myth that journalists in general have a liberal bias?"

"The easiest rule," Schlesinger cautioned, "is to stop, think and imagine: How would you feel and how would you react if someone made your Facebook page or blog or online comment a story? Could you defend your objectivity? Could Reuters defend having you on the beat you’re on? Could your reputation, and ours, survive someone making an issue of it?"

I'm sure neither Schlesinger nor I have had the last word on the relationship of journalism and social media, nor on whether we're all too connected. What we need to pay attention to is the quality of those connections.

What do you think about how journalists are and should be using social media and microblogging? Let us know here -- and don't feel like you have to keep your thoughts to 140 characters.

-- Paul Taylor is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --

The United States is fighting a fire in the world economy, but Germany and some other European countries fear a flood of inflation as a result.

That clash of cultures is at the heart of transatlantic debate over whether Europe should spend more and ease monetary policy to revive growth, with a deep economic contraction certain this year and an end to the recession not yet in sight.

The perception gap could cause lingering resentment among Americans and Germans on the way out of the crisis.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick sees concern on both sides of the Atlantic, not just in Europe, at the risk of inflation down the road from the massive additional liquidity created by the U.S. Federal Reserve and soaring public debt.

The current gush of liquidity made the glut after the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2001 look like a desert, he told the weekend Brussels Forum, a conference of North American and European policymakers, business and opinion leaders.

The dollar's sharp fall and the jump in the price of gold after the Fed's announcement of a giant purchase of long Treasury bonds reflected fears that the United States will try to inflate its way out of the crisis.

"What some political leaders say when you bring this up is: "Well gee, when we're putting out the fire, can you really worry about the water damage?" In a way, you really do have to worry about both," Zoellick said, advocating a timely pathway back to fiscal and monetary discipline.

The European Central Bank has provided unlimited liquidity for banks to unfreeze credit markets and is weighing following the Fed into unconventional measures such as buying bonds to provide an extra monetary stimulus. But Germans are especially wary due to their traumatic history of hyperinflation in the 1920s, something that contributed to the rise of Hitler.

"I can promise you the European response to this crisis will not be inflationary. That's why guys like me exist," German Bundesbank President Axel Weber, a member of the ECB's Governing Council, told the Brussels Forum. "I can promise you once it starts looking inflationary we will tidy up the mess."

European Union leaders agreed at a summit last week they had taken enough fiscal stimulus measures for now and rejected pressure from the Obama administration to do more.

German leaders were particularly dismissive of calls to throw more money at the crisis when two stimulus packages adopted in the last five months are still being implemented.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso made clear EU countries would review their stimulus efforts if the economy continues to deteriorate. European Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said the high debt levels of many states before the crisis were a constraint on further deficit spending.

"We are concerned by countries whose public debt is increasing very, very fast," Almunia told the forum. "We cannot afford to spend the next two decades absorbing the debt we have created to tackle this very deep recession."

The dispute about how to fight the crisis may have longer term negative consequences on both sides of the Atlantic -- fuelling pressure in the United States for trade protectionism and stoking opposition in Germany to helping European partners.

Germans feel they made tough choices in the good times to balance their budget and cut unit labor costs to improve their competitiveness. Now many feel they are being expected to pay for the fiscal recklessness of other European countries.

Americans are raging at the greed and irresponsibility of bankers and corporate moguls. But if Main Street resents bailing out Wall Street, it will be even more resistant to paying to revive European or emerging economies through imports.

Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, the British minister in charge of preparing next week's London crisis summit of G20 nations, said there was a big risk if Americans felt other countries were not pulling their weight in reviving the global economy.

"The most dangerous idea out there is that the world is somehow going to expect the American consumer to ride to he rescue," the former senior U.N. official said. "If that idea is left out there, it's going to lead to protectionism in America."