It would appear that India is having a good crisis. Despite initial appearances to the contrary, the Great Recession turned out to be anything but ‘global’. While the advanced industrial countries, pre-eminently the US, were hardest hit, growth in the emerging economies, India prominent among them, slowed only momentarily. As the crisis wore on and growth differentials widened, it became clear that the emerging countries were increasingly becoming the motors of world growth, thereby signalling an acceleration of the geopolitical shift of capitalism’s centre of gravity away from the US and the advanced industrial world and towards them. This shift was announced by Goldman Sachs in its famous ‘BRIC’ thesis almost a decade ago. But its pace was slower then, thanks to the US-dominated world financial system funnelling so much of the world’s capital, and demand, into the US economy.
