America is in retreat and so is Gordon Brown

But what has become clear to me is that America is not so much triumphing as in slow economic retreat. What is going on is the old-fashioned industrialisation of a huge chunk of the world’s economy, and principally Asia, which grew by a colossal 7.5 per cent in 2005. A year-end revaluation of China’s GDP now makes it larger than Britain’s.

This has had four major effects in 2005: an extraordinary bull market in commodities, a disruption in world capital flows, increased protectionism in the US, and, of course, global climate change.

independent