Resilience Is Not Forever

摘要

Imagine it's the early fall of 2000, and you're asked to play futurologist and determine how the world economy will look in four years' time. To make your task easier a soothsayer whispers that the long expansion of the 1990s is about to end in a resounding bust of the dot-com bubble; all the major world economies for the first time in many years will soon be in recession simultaneously, the world will be shocked politically and economically by horrendous terrorist attacks on U.S. territory; financial markets will be further challenged by both the biggest sovereign debt default and the largest private-sector bankruptcies in history, not to mention nasty corporate scandals; the U.S. will fight not one but two regional wars with significant geopolitical consequences; and in four years the price of oil will be 50% higher. Had you believed your soothsayer's dire pronouncements, your predictions for 2004 would probably have been terribly gloomy, to say the least. Well, as we all know, those disasters did occur, but a shattered global economy in 2004 did not result That's not to say that the road from the end of the dot-com euphoria has been painless. However, global growth in 2004 will be the highest it's been in nearly 30 years, and inflation—despite the recent explosion in commodity prices—remains at historically low levels.