> So Jim McNeil, the Goldman Sachs economist who coined the term "BRICs,"
> says the U.S. is going to surprise everyone this year by doing rather
> well. We'll see, won't we?
Oh, I'm not forecasting total collapse, mostly because core Europe and East Asia are solvent, and the BRICs don't want a meltdown. McNeil does have a point -- housing should bottom out this year, and the BRICs + the nations of the semiperiphery (3.8 billion people, $19 trillion in annual output) are big enough, rich enough and have enough technological capacity to get the world economy moving again. Call it the Big Handoff, instead of the Big Crash the goldbugs and neo-Calvinists are salivating for.
-- DRR