India Stumbles

Just like China, India's ascent was unlikely to be linear. A bit of perspective on the economic news coming out of India (WalterRussellMead via Instapundit):

“India is now the sick man of Asia. They are in a crisis.” said one economist. “I think things will get much worse before they get better,” said another. “The government is between a rock and a hard place.” The Sensex, India’s stock index, fell precipitously last week. The rupee hit another record low today.

It wasn’t so long ago that many were writing about how India was destined to rival China as a global power. Various American officials, including President Obama, have endorsed India’s bid to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council. Has this “summer of difficulties” cast all this into doubt?

Probably not. Just as a summer of good news does not mean an economy will be soaring forever, a period of bad news does not mean it will always be flailing. As the chief economist of the World Bank said in a press conference yesterday, ”Growth may not have bottomed out. We have further to go (down), but the situation is not as bad as is being captured by the mood and captured in the headlines. India is nowhere near the 1991 crisis. The gloom is being overplayed.”

As a general rule, the MSM and the Davoisie overreact to trends. America was supposed to be invincible in the 1990s, and after 2008 the consensus voices pronounced that we had entered a terminal decline. Similarly the BRICs were unstoppable and taking over the world a couple of years ago; now they are supposedly roadkill on the economic highway.