Made in USA: A Big Slump
December 20th, 2006Via: Newsweek:
The world is unprepared for a slump made in America. That’s the distinct impression I gather from six weeks of globe-hopping that took me to Japan, South Africa, the Middle East, Singapore, Hong Kong, China and Australia.
Most I met believe that the world has now “decoupled” from the United States—with increasingly robust economies from Asia to Europe fully capable of standing on their own in the event of an American soft patch. Two key questions come to mind: What if the U.S. soft patch isn’t all that soft after all? What if a supposedly robust world turns out to be more dependent on American than it is willing to admit?
The overseas view is that America is fine—that there’s no need to sweat the current downshift. There is deep trust in the line of analysis favored by Fed chairman Ben Bernanke—that any slowing is nothing more than a housing-related pullback that shouldn’t spill over to the rest of the $13 trillion U.S. economy.
Oh really?
