Given the immense uncertainty, any judgement on what will happen has to come with a strong health warning. With that in mind, we will still say this: even with many things possibly going wrong in the coming year, America itself will probably muddle through as it has before.
Mexico used to be pitied because it was “so far from God and so near the US”. But in today’s closely interconnected world, all of us are also “so near the US”. For good or bad, whatever happens in the world’s biggest economy and its most powerful nation will have tremendous implications for us in Asia.
Whether it is the coming presidential election, how America’s economy performs, what its central bank will do, how its dollar will move or how much oil it could produce — all these matters greatly to us.
