Has the World Decoupled from the U.S.?

Is the rest of  the world heavily dependent on the fate of the U.S. economy, or can other countries, for the most part, withstand a housing led slowdown in the U.S.?:

The Global Question: Who Needs the U.S.?, by Peter Gumbel, Time: ...Nicole Leibinger-Kammüller ..., chief executive of Trumpf, a family-owned machine-tool firm in Germany, has watched orders from the critical U.S. market slow significantly in the past few months. But while the housing-bled U.S. economy has been sluggish, and the dollar weak, it's all proving quite manageable. "We can feel the U.S. slowdown, but it's not unsettling. There's no crash," Leibinger-Kammüller says. Trumpf's sales of its metal-cutting machines elsewhere--to Saudi Arabia, to Singapore and especially in Germany--continue to rack up double-digit growth rates. ...

Economists and policymakers ... have been furiously debating whether the world has "decoupled" from the U.S. economy. The U.S. constitutes about 28% of global gross domestic product (GDP) as measured in dollars, and it accounted for one-fifth of worldwide growth from 2000 to 2006. When the U.S. faltered in the past, the rest of the world staggered. And certainly there are signs of fatigue. A cooling housing market slowed U.S. GDP growth to 2% in the third quarter...

Jim O'Neill, London-based head of global economic research for Goldman Sachs, says that even if the U.S. economy remains soft for much of the year, "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." ...

Still, even the biggest optimists concede that nobody would escape unscathed if the U.S. economy were to hit a wall. Its big local trading partners, Mexico and Canada, would probably be hurt the most, but the reverberations would be felt worldwide. The key bone of contention is the extent of the suffering.

Those who dispute the decoupling theory point to the seemingly insatiable appetite of American consumers for imported goods, which has been a critical driver of the world's economic expansion. ...

Stephen Roach ... has long warned about the dangers of flagging U.S. demand. Now he's concerned too about signs he sees of a possible Chinese slowdown--one reason why he thinks global growth this year will be "significantly below what most are expecting."

So will it be a "happy slowdown," as Goldman's O'Neill predicts, or a meltdown? You can have your own debate; in the meantime, here are some of the key issues:

THE U.S.: GO YANKEES What economists are struggling to predict is how pervasive the impact of this housing slowdown will be on the rest of the U.S. economy, and abroad. Perhaps most surprising, American consumers are continuing to spend...

ASIA: SPENDERS WANTED Purchases by Asia's rising middle class have made the region far less dependent on exports to the U.S. to power the economy. Today only 16.5% of Asia's exports are sold in the U.S., down from 25.5% in 1993. Yet there are significant regional differences. ...

EUROPE: HOLD ON It's the euro that has so far borne the brunt of the dollar's decline: it rose about 10% last year against the greenback. A stronger currency makes European exports more expensive for foreign buyers. But that hasn't prevented Germany from notching up its biggest trade surplus since the fall of the Berlin Wall 16 years ago. The good news is that buoyant exports have boosted business confidence in Europe's biggest economy and led to an unexpectedly strong increase in domestic demand...

Can Germany take the load off the U.S. and the rest of Europe? Growth in the 13 nations that have adopted the euro is expected to be 2.6% in 2006, unusually strong for the growth-challenged Continent... "Europe is going to have a great year," reckons Harvard professor Kenneth Rogoff, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund...