Some good news: the world economy has never been healthier!

While some Americans have been failing Home Economics 101 and splurging on things they didn't need or could appropriately afford, from this Newsweek story the rest of the world has been behaving... (drum roll, please)...quite responsibly! While it's too soon to know if a newly adult world will help bail the U.S. out of its housing-induced hangover, it's still good news that once we recover the world's economies will mostly be on better footing:

For the past four years, the world has grown at a 5.2 percent annual rate—a full 2 percentage points higher than in the '80s and '90s—thanks in large part to booming emerging markets. While the United States and many parts of Europe are lagging, most of the rest of the planet is soaring. Consider that between 1980 and 2000, the number of countries growing at 5 percent or more hovered around 50. In 2006, 104 nations grew at that rate...

Even as Western consumers have fudged on retirement savings in favor of flat-screen TVs, and Western governments have skimped on education and infrastructure, emerging nations have been paying back debt, taming inflation, strengthening their institutions, diversifying their economies and generally behaving like responsible global citizens. The result has been a huge range of benefits: fewer hungry children in Tanzania, increased political stability in Brazil and a more balanced global financial system, in which nations previously labeled unstable debtors are now extending credit to richer countries...

Emerging nations are no longer just extracting resources and supplying cheap labor, but growing their own massive middle classes, breeding world-beating companies and becoming players on the global financial stage. Such developments—the prospect of China suddenly being a major source of investment capital, cash-rich Latin American countries banding together to lend to one another, Russia emerging as the top luxury-car market—have defied the predictions of the world's collective economic wisdom.

Bueno trabajo!