LONDON — Ten years ago some commentators, including myself, were forecasting that the age of Westernization was over and that the age of Easternization was about to begin. Capital and technology that had flowed from the West to the East for several centuries past was now about to start flowing the other way.
At the time the idea was ridiculed. It was claimed the rising Asian nations would go on needing Western techniques and Western investment just as they had always done.
Yet now, 10 years later, the turn-around has indeed taken place. The wealth that once flowed from Europe and America to the Eastern world has dried up and vast new funds from cash-rich Asia and from the oil-producing Mideast, awash with dollars from oil sales, are cascading the opposite way.