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Fareed Zakaria Features Guest Who Rebukes Central Argument of Zakaria's Book

January 19, 2020

Fareed Zakaria, who theorized about the coming post-America world order in his 2008 book, featured a guest on his Sunday show who said America's economic dominance in the past decade has expanded.

The segment, titled "America's Decade of Dominance," featured Ruchir Sharma, chief global strategist for Morgan Stanley. Sharma said that investing in the 2010s was "all about America."

"America's share in the global economy actually increased from 23 to 25 percent," Sharma said. "Now you can say that's not much of an increase, but given what people thought what America was going to do at the turn of the decade where there was so much declinism about America, this is a pretty surprising outcome."

"When it comes to stock market returns, when it comes to the use of the U.S. dollar in the international system, the U.S. completely dominates in a way that no other country does," Sharma continued. "In fact, the dominance of the U.S. today is so complete that the U.S. share in the global stock markets today is 56 percent."

He also pointed out that the U.S. stock market has seen a far larger increase in value than any other nation's stock market over the last decade.

These numbers run contrary to Zakaria's thesis featured in his 2008 book, The Post-American World. Zakaria argued that America's economic dominance would be undermined by an ineffective political system as other countries caught up to the United States.

However, even Zakaria circa 2020 was forced to agree that this had not come to pass.

"We started the global financial crisis but by the end of it we came out of it better than anybody else," Zakaria said Sunday.