Global Trade's Precarious Balance

Global Trade's Precarious Balance -- Thursday, Jan. 18, 2007 -- Printout -- TIME: "When a country or a company depends to an important degree on the U.S. for its livelihood, you might think that recent financial events there would amount to very bad news indeed. America's economy flagged in the second half of last year and the dollar has dropped sharply against the euro and other currencies, making exports to the U.S. less competitive. Yet Nicola Leibinger-Kammller, for one, is still smiling.

She's the chief executive of Trumpf, a German family-owned machine-tool firm. It has enjoyed a surge in worldwide orders over the past three years, with sales jumping 35% since 2004. Demand from the U.S., the firm's second-largest market after Germany, has accounted for a significant part of this growth. But even though the pace of American orders is now slowing, Trumpf's sales elsewhere—from Saudi Arabia to Singapore, and especially back home in Germany—continue to rack up double-digit growth rates. 'We can feel the U.S. slowdown, but it's not unsettling. There's no crash,' Leibinger-Kammller says. The continuing buoyancy of global trade 'is amazing. We have to keep telling ourselves: Careful, this can't last.'

As 2007 gets underway, that uneasy mixture of confidence and incredulity seems to be a global phenomenon. Economists, bankers and policymakers have long/.../"