Don't sell America's economy short

There have been plenty of crises in the past -- the stagflation and oil-price spikes of the 1970s, the savings and loan debacle and soaring trade and budget deficits of the 1980s, the popping of the dot-come bubble and the terrorist attacks in the early 2000s -- that led many observers to predict that the United States would soon go the way of Rome.

What the pessimists ignore is that the fundamentals of the U.S. economy remain strong. Indeed, the World Economic Forum has ranked the United States as the world's most competitive economy for the last two years. Its statistics show that per-capita [explaining China] gross domestic product in the U.S. has consistently grown faster than in other developed economies since 1980.

America's competitors display other weaknesses that become apparent in times of crisis. As Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson noted over the weekend in the Washington Post, while the U.S. stock market has declined roughly 18% this year, China has seen a fall of 48% and Russia of 55%. "These figures are not very good advertisements for the more regulated, state-led economic models favored in Beijing and Moscow," he wrote.

READ MORE