Who's the Anchor Now?

For weeks now, the word on everyone's lips is recession. Is it going to happen, when is going to happen. how deep will it be, and on and on. The one thing that everyone is sure of is that global growth is strong, it's the US that is the problem. How strong is this growth? If the US does go into recession, what is going to drive global growth? In the past, it has been the US consumer. The pundits say the consumer won't be there this time, that everyone is weighed down by there ever-increasing sub-prime mortgage payment (By the way, it is incredible how many people are living in houses with sub-prime mortgages. If you have watched or read the media over the past two months, it would thought that the percentage is somewhere around 96%). The pundits also say that other areas of the world will pick up the slack. This maybe true and I'm not from Missouri, but you will have to show me that if the US is the anchor holding back the world's economic growth, that the rest of the world doesn't slow down too. Japan just posted a quarter of negative growth, however they are the poster child for stagnation (For those of you old enough to remember the Eighties, the same thing that was being said about Japan then, is the same thing being said about China now. In 1989, the Japanese stock market drove off a cliff, never to be heard from since). Europe will be next, then the commodity countries.

Continued global growth would be a better scenario then what is in the previous paragraph. It would be good for this country to be more export-focused; look how it has helped every other country in the world. However, if the $290 billion the US sent out of this country slows down, somebody has to be affected. It's not so easy to develop markets away from the US as US markets are generally open to all.