A Precarious Balance

Whe

n a country or a company depends to an important degree on the U.S. for its livelihood, you might think that recent financial events there would amount to very bad news indeed. America's economy flagged in the second half of last year and the dollar has dropped sharply against the euro and other currencies, making exports to the U.S. less competitive. Yet Nicola Leibinger-Kammüller, for one, is still smiling.

She's the chief executive of Trumpf, a German family-owned machine-tool firm. It has enjoyed a surge in worldwide orders over the past three years, with sales jumping 35% since 2004. Demand from the U.S., the firm's second-largest market after Germany, has accounted for a significant part of this growth. But even though the pace of American orders is now slowing, Trumpf's sales elsewhere—from Saudi Arabia to Singapore, and especially back home in Germany—continue to rack up double-digit growth rates. "We can feel the U.S. slowdown, but it's not unsettling. There's no crash," Leibinger-Kammüller says. The continuing buoyancy of global trade "is amazing. We have to keep telling ourselves: Careful, this can't last."

As 2007 gets underway, that uneasy mixture of confidence and incredulity seems to be a global phenomenon. Economists, bankers and policymakers have long argued about the extent to which the world economy remains dependent on America, and the issue will loom large at this year's World Economic Forum in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos in late January. The U.S. constitutes about 28% of global gross domestic product as measured in dollars, and it accounted for one-fifth of worldwide growth between 2000 and 2006. So the big question is: If America's growth doesn't pick up significantly, can other countries make up the shortfall? That question has taken on fresh urgency as the once hot U.S. housing market has cooled, putting a chill on the rest of the domestic economy. U.S. GDP growth dropped to 2% in the third quarter, less than half the blistering 5.6% rate of the first three months of 2006. The prospect of a continuing slowdown has sent shivers of concern from Bangkok to Bordeaux.

But so far, at least, the answer seems to be that the world can indeed ride out a period of U.S. weakness. "The overwhelming evidence of the past few months is that the rest of the world is doing just fine, and that some places are doing better than just fine," says Jim O'Neill, London-based head of global economic research for Goldman Sachs. Even if the U.S. economy remains soft for much of the year, O'Neill adds, "we're pretty confident that the rest of the world will withstand it." At the German Engineering Federation in Frankfurt, chief economist Ralph Wiechers concurs. "It used to be that the U.S. economy supported the world economy," he says. "Now it's the other way around."

Not everyone agrees with this upbeat assessment, of course, and the debate about the extent to which the world has decoupled from the U.S. rages on. Critically, many forecasts for the U.S. predict weaker growth in 2007 but not the ultimate test of full-blown recession. Indeed, judging by some of the latest data that shows rising U.S. wages and exports, the worst may already be over. The International Monetary Fund recently increased its prediction for global GDP growth in 2007 to 4.9% from 4.7%. If that turns out to be correct, this year will be the fourth in a row with an economic expansion rate above or close to 5%, the best performance since the early 1970s. China continues to race ahead at the astonishing pace of 10% growth or more, pulling much of Asia with it. Japan's economy, the world's second largest, is again expanding and the deflation that has racked the country for years is coming to an end. And in Europe, where the economy has been sluggish for most of this decade, there's fresh evidence that Germany—after four years of almost no growth—is finally rebounding.