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I am taken back to the year 2000, when during the then American President Bill Clinton’s historic visit to India, I had started my seminar series called “The Great Indian Dream – India can beat America,” with a front page advertisement in leading dailies welcoming Clinton on the day of his arrival to India. The header of the ad said, “LAST DAYS OF AMERICAN SUPREMACY.” It has been seven years since then, and the time has come for people to realise the unfolding of the same in front of them and grasp the reasons behind the same. The time for the great power shift has come – the time for power to shift from the American hands to the Chinese, Indian and, dare I say, the Middle Eastern hands. As I wrote in my editorial two issues ago in The Sunday Indian magazine, on account of the cataclysmic losses that each of the US financial behemoths has been suffering, many of them have been incessantly bailed out by Middle Eastern petrodollars. So, while the investments of Kuwait Investment Authority this year have been to the tune of $2 billion in Merrill Lynch, in addition to a bailout package of $3 billion for the beleaguered Citigroup, there are monoliths like Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, whose assets globally are above $800 billion on conservative estimates. Interestingly, this company is now the largest shareholder in Citibank, through its investment of $7.5 billion, and also has a stake in Carlyle Group – one of the largest American PE players – as well as a 28 per cent share in the London Stock Exchange; no wonder then that for Americans, destroying them physically had assumed so much importance. And, if I were to put it mildly, it has all been a result of America’s stupid belief in fiscal bottom-line oriented shamefully inhuman capitalism.

For many, the current crash in the US financial system is comparable to that of the Great Depression of the 30s, while many others are stating it is nothing more than a cyclical trend that would soon get mitigated with time. But what many are not realising is the fact that this disaster is not an incident in isolation – it would invariably have far reaching repercussions and perhaps is the harbinger of the shape of things to come.

Economic disasters are nothing new and since the end of the World War II, history has been littered with instances of economies that apparently seemed very strong suddenly going bust and taking a long time to come out of it. Some actually never came out at all. The most recent, glaring and memorable incident that happened in the last decade was the financial crisis of South East Asia. Before their collapse, they were often called the Asian Tigers that could take on Japan, and would be the centre of development for Asia around which other countries of Asia – including China and India – would have their domestic growth.

Most of those Asian Tigers, like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and South Korea, were all lured by the illusion created by the US-backed financial institutions. Most of the Foreign Institutional Investors invariably overestimated the growth, and the extent to which these countries could export to the US markets. Based on their overestimated estimates, and suffering from a herd mindset, most of the companies (particularly in the manufacturing segment) made the identical mistake of borrowing short-term money for long-term projects. The world has been an audience to how their entire calculations went awry, leading to a major foreign exchange crisis. In fact, the Central Banks of those countries, following the American footsteps of free-floating of currency, suddenly realised how things had gone far beyond their control. The damage was such that most of the South East Asian countries took nearly a decade to come out of that disaster. The same is the case with Japan which, in spite of being one of the largest economies of the world, is yet to recover from the deep recession that it entered into, thanks to the same real estate bubble collapse that happened there.

The same story holds true for countries like Mexico and Argentina as well. It is intriguing that all these economies blindly indoctrinated the American lessons. No wonder that the American school of thought manifests from the Wall Street, which, in its quest to be extra bold, led many

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