Decoupling Debunked

A former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board famously described his job as "taking the punch bowl away just when the party is getting good." Current Fed chief Ben Bernanke wishes that description still applied. With stock markets reeling worldwide and recession looming in the U.S., the world's largest economy, Bernanke's Fed is frantically ladling out punch in the form of interest-rate cuts — even though almost everyone already has a brutal hangover.

An emergency rate cut on Jan. 22 shows just how anxious the Fed has become. The reduction by three-quarters of a percentage point was the deepest since October 1984. Bernanke concluded a big dose was needed, fast, to stem a virtual free fall in global stock markets. On Jan. 21 and 22, investors around the world went on a panicked selling spree that resulted in heavy losses. London's FTSE 100 index fell 5.5% on Jan. 21, while Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index fell more than 13% in two trading sessions; Mumbai's Sensex dropped more than 12% over two days.

The Fed's move reassured some markets. Hong Kong stocks rebounded by more than 10%. But relief may be temporary, because emerging-markets investors are finally absorbing a grim truth: the U.S. appears to be in real economic trouble. Most economists now believe the country is on the brink of its first recession since 2001, and that it could be a doozy. Forget all the talk about the "decoupling" of emerging economies, the theory that countries like China and India are no longer dependent upon U.S. trade and can continue to power strong global growth even as the U.S. staggers. "There's no question the slump in the U.S. will hurt [Asia's] exports badly," says Shanghai-based independent economist Andy Xie. Indeed, demand for such diverse goods as iron ore mined in Australia and toys manufactured in China is already slowing, because for the first time in a decade the "key driver of the U.S. economy, the consumer, seems to have finally thrown in the towel," says Xie. If true — and the economic data increasingly suggest that it is — the party really is over, and Bernanke may not have a big enough punch bowl to get it started again.