The State of the World's Economy

When I first thought about writing this post, I figured I'd write about the whole wide world... I suppose as I contemplated more about the topic, it dawned on me, that it is precisely that thought that makes the whole discussion an almost nefarious, or rather meaningless one. It is simply impossible to write an article about the world economy. The world economy is not a singular "thing"! The world economy is in fact a collection of more than 200 different sovereign economies, and in fact, even some sovereign states have different economies going on in it. The US, for example, is a cluster of 52 different economies. California for instance, is widely quoted to be among the world's top 10 economies!

I guess the point I want to make... is that one lives in a fool's paradise when one speak of the world economy. Notwithstanding whatever CNN, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, AlJazeera and any other global news network wants us to believe. India for instance, grew (Q2 FY2010) at a rate in excess of 8.5%. China, almost 10%. The US, just under 2%, the GCC hover between 4% and 6% and Greece, poor Greece, remains deep in recession territory. One look at this broad range and any reasonable man has to conclude that there is just far too many divergence to conveniently lump these in a single descriptive term called the world economy.



So instead of writing about the world economy, I thought it might be more entertaining to study how those countries which are burdened by sluggish economies, how they manage to divert attention away from the economic failures.

The US for instance, found the nifty niche of withdrawing from Iraq to steer the camera's away from the depressing numbers on Wall Street... and the withdrawal couldn't come soon enough. The previous story began to run out of steam when the world pointed out the American inherent prejudice and blatant discrimination of the previous story. Of course, here we mean the building of a Mosque near Ground Zero!

The Spanish still bask in a glow of the World Cup aftermath, but even that story is beginning to lose its luster in the wake of a depressing 25% unemployment number.

France, found the need to create a story and decided to throw out the Roma people in a most outrageous gesture of collective punishment and blatant racism. Now we've come to expect France under the leadership of President Sarkozy to use race or religion to mask the depressing poll ratings and the even more depressing economic numbers.

Poor Greece... no story could be created to move away the world's camera lenses from the economic disaster that they are courting. Not even the fact that they have banned mosques in Athens, (the two existing mosques in Athens have been locked up and cant be used by the Greek Muslims to pray in!) is sufficient fodder for the newshounds to redirect the focus.

Even Greece can take solace from the fact that... notwithstanding how savvy the PR team or Propaganda machine is, in the end, the problem might have been hidden for a while, but it certainly hasn't gone away. Just ask President Obama... just a year ago he was arguably the most popular president in the USA for a long time... and today, he is struggling to keep the newshounds away from the dirty truth, that the US Economy is anaemic, and people are smarting... despite the hundreds of billions of Dollars of stimulus money.