By Arun Kumar, IANS,
Washington : After the fall of General Motors, “once the embodiment of US economic might,” Americans should get used to the fact that “upstarts” like China and India are “ready to rule world economy,” a US commentator said.
“We may not like to admit it, but it’s time to get used to this fact: emerging markets such as China and India are quickly becoming the world’s new economic powerhouses,” Paul R. La Monica, CNNMoney.com editor at large wrote in a commentary Wednesday.
He noted that the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), a London-based economic consulting firm, had predicted emerging market economies may overtake the US and the rest of the Western world this year instead of 2015 as predicted earlier.
However, “This doesn’t necessarily mean that the United States is doomed to a massive economic fall from grace,” La Monica said. “In fact, it does not appear to be a coincidence that hopes of a US economic recovery have helped lead a surge in stocks in China, India, Latin America and other emerging markets.”
Noting that with the United States showing some signs of economic stabilisation, emerging markets to have snapped back, he said: “So rather than bemoaning the West’s inevitable slip in economic importance, investors need to embrace emerging markets and realize that interdependence is key to the global economy.”
“China and other emerging markets have tied themselves intricately to the US economic system,” he said citing James Swanson, chief investment strategist with MFS Investment Management in Boston. “As the US recovers, that means that there will be a lot of earnings growth coming out of China and other emerging markets like India and Brazil.”
With that in mind, Swanson said investors need to be thinking more about buying shares of multinational US construction firms that will benefit from increased demand in emerging markets, as well as mining, energy and manufacturing companies in China, India and Brazil.
“So if companies such as Alcoa, Ford Motor and ExxonMobil are in your portfolio, you might also want to take a look at Aluminum Corp. of China (ACH), India’s Tata Motors (TTM) and Brazil’s Petrobras (PBR) as well,” he said.
“US investors can’t have 80 percent to 90 percent of their portfolio in the US anymore,” Swanson said. “The old notion of having 5 percent to 10 percent in international stocks is outdated. Americans should increase their weight in emerging markets.”