Oh, woe! Ebola has come to America and 150 people from infected countries are landing here every day. ISIS is battering the Kurds, to whom we have not sent the weapons we promised, and will chase the Iraqi army out of Baghdad as soon as they finish taking over Kobani. Europe is headed into still another recession, its banks loaded down with bad loans as next week’s stress tests approach, Italy and France are basket cases, the mighty German growth machine is stalled, the central bank paralyzed by the inability of EU members to persuade German chancellor Angela Merkel to have mercy on their slumping economies. Three of the four once-touted BRICs are in trouble. Brazil, the world’s seventh largest economy, is in recession. Russia has bitten off a piece of Ukraine, whetting Vladimir Putin’s appetite for the Baltics despite an economy in chaos as a result of sanctions imposed by the West. China is in the midst of a property bust, another purge of enemies of the state, and experiencing a growth rate that has shrunk from over 7 to 6 percent (official data) or 3 percent (outside experts). Japan is reeling from the effect of tax increases. Our political class has no idea what to do about any of these problems. Panic. Sell, sell.
Or don’t. The world just might be too, too much with us, distracting attention from America’s underlying strengths and enormous resilience. According to the latest report of Goldman Sachs’s Private Wealth Management Investment Strategy Group, “The notion of U.S. pre-eminence … has gained momentum in recent years. Since our 2010 Outlook … we have held the view that the financial crisis ‘has not dealt a fatal blow to the US as the preeminent economic and geopolitical power.’” It’s worth taking a look at what the Goldman Sachs team calls “the unparalleled strengths and resilience of the US economy and US institutions.” Those advantages account for a widening gap between per-capita GDP in America and in China and the eurozone.
