By Tom Plate
LOS ANGELES ― In a storm you can never be sure of who your friends are, where you can hope to duck for cover or to whom you will be deeply thankful when the skies clear and the worst is over. The current world economic storm that's brewing over our heads illustrates this eternal truism perfectly.
The almighty American dollar is in trouble ― it has been steadily weakening and may not have hit bottom yet. Americans traveling abroad are feeling this already as the returns on their converted dollars shrivel, increasing their costs and their worries.
The dollar's downsizing reflects the overall weakening of the American economy ― and more and more it looks to be recession-bound.
So who are the friends who will come to the rescue and help keep things from getting out of hand?
The answer is countries and economies that just 10 years ago were basket cases. Remember the Asian financial crisis? For a two to three year stretch in the late nineties, economies now as robust as South Korea's were looking to be hospital-bound.
But time ― and economic reform ― can work miracles. Ten years later many once-anemic economies (particularly the so-called ``emerging'' ones) have been tightened, modernized and stoked up for action.
About half of America's exports are brought these days not by the rich and established economies, such as Europe's, but by these emerging ones, from China to Brazil.
Until just recently, China was the target of umbrage from high-profile Congressmen of the type who saw the land of 1.3 billion people as the enemy. Almost everything was China's fault, especially its own artificially undervalued currency. But the Chinese have their mysterious oriental ways, do they not? Their ferocious economic appetite is helping to keep the world economy from going flat simply because America's is heading for limbo.
``We have been very impressed by the fact that economies [like China's] have engaged actively at the level of the global economy,'' commented Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, summarizing the collective sentiments of a major economic-summit in Cape Town.
More and more, we in America are dependent on others, just as in the past others were so dependent economically on the U.S. When things are good elsewhere, this is good for America: Those ``other'' countries and economies are in effect allies when they are healthy and economic enemies mainly when they are not.
If we here in the United States lose economic momentum, they can keep us from falling down lower by not losing their own momentum.
Overall, global gross domestic product (GDP) growth means steady world demand for imports, including our own. The Economist ― that venerable and continually essential political weekly out of London ― estimates that for the first half of 2007, the increase in consumer spending in China and India alone added more to the global GDP growth than consumer spending in America.
The world economy still is not out of trouble, not by any means. And global jitters will grow if the dollar's drop doesn't bottom out before long. Many countries hold their cash reserves in dollars and find it discomforting to see the size of their sovereign holdings shrivel by the day.
And no one knows exactly what damage the continually rising oil price will inflict on economic stability. It's no secret that gold prices are extremely high right now: the dollar is less and less the preferred token of payment.
But not so long ago, it would be inconceivable to believe that a serious U.S. downturn wouldn't mean curtains for everyone else. Nor was it conceivable then to imagine that enough economic strength existed outside American borders to cushion a sick Uncle Sam's fall. But this is the 21st century, and times are changing.
What's clearer by the day is that the architecture of the world economic order is undergoing change. While the U.S. may remain the world's sole military superpower for now, the economic landscape has become multi-polar.
New economic superstructures all over the globe are coming to the fore. It is therefore getting all the more complicated, but at the same time the new economic order may prove, over the long run at least, more stable, precisely because the chips are spread more evenly across the playfields of global economics. And for this, paradoxically, Americans should give thanks.
Syndicated Columnist and UCLA professor Tom Plate is a board member of the Burkle Center for International Relations. He is also a veteran U.S. journalist and author of ``Confessions of an American Media Man."