Globally Synchronized What?

In one of those rare turns, the term “globally synchronized growth” actually means what the words do. It is economic growth that for the first time in ten years has all the major economies of the world participating in it. It’s the kind of big idea that seems like a big thing we all should pay attention to.

In The New York Times this weekend, we learn:

A decade after the world descended into a devastating economic crisis, a key marker of revival has finally been achieved. Every major economy on earth is expanding at once, a synchronous wave of growth that is creating jobs, lifting fortunes and tempering fears of popular discontent.

It’s that last one where the narrative takes on its current tinge of desperation. After the “unexpected” downturn in 2015-16 that sparked widespread global “discontent” at the ballot box, many in the so-called establishment wish for it to have been illegitimate; nothing more than the world’s xenophobic racists allowing their xenophobia and racism to undermine tighter and beneficial globalizations.

That’s ultimately the problem, though. There wasn’t supposed to have been any downturn at all; in 2015-16, or any other period. In fact, what really sparked populism is that to this day there isn’t any official acknowledgement that anything was wrong at the time, a microcosm of whole last decade. Even this “globally synchronized growth” is an attempt at a whitewash; the populists were wrong, it is now claimed, when they tried to turn “transitory” negative factors into something more than they were.

But it’s always the optimistic side that does that, the very thing many people at the electoral margins are simply fed up with. In fact, we’ve been here before. Just three years ago in late 2014 and early 2015 “global growth” was just as ubiquitous. We are supposed to notice the difference, this later addition of synchronized economies as if that was the temporarily missing piece.