Troubling news from the world financial markets(US markets are closed today in observance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday) as stock prices decline on fears of United States recession. The New York Times points out that:

The angst about the United States belies the popular theory that Europe and Asia are not as dependent on the American economy as they once were, in part because they trade more with each other. The theory, known as decoupling, has been used to explain why economies like China and Germany have kept growing robustly, even as the United States has slowed.

Emphasizing the fact that despite the strong growth of Asian economies in the past decade, United States can still exert a powerful economic pull on those nations. The global market seems to persist as officials from the European Central Bank have also questioned the idea that the world’s major markets have “decoupled”, making them less subject to the recent downturn in American fortunes.
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