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Ahead now, I think you'll see the big nations shrink back into their own corners of the world. I'm not saying we'll see no international trade, but it will be nothing like the conveyer belt from China to Wal-Mart that we've known the last few decades. And the prospects for conflict are very, very high.

The future will be less predictable, forecast rises will shrink, company lifetimes will shrink, new entrants will proliferate and it's going to just get more unpredictable.

Even as China's growth slows, it will continue to be a powerhouse for the global economy.

I may sound naive, since everyone's decided the next two years are going to be all about 2016, but I look at what's happened over the years when there's been divided government. That's when we've done tax reform, that's when we've done entitlement reform - to move this economy forward on these big issues.

China is doing lots of things right. It's investing in education and R&D, it's opening up, it's more cosmopolitan than it's ever been. I think it's very likely that China will continue to explode economically and certainly become a superpower.

Global fuel and consumption, however, is projected to increase by 100 to 150 percent over the next 20 years, driven largely by the rapidly growing Chinese and Indian economies; and this growth and this increase in demand will force prices even higher.

We expect that in the next years, the economy will improve. And we expect that extreme poverty will drop from 22 percent to 11 percent by the year 2000.

The challenge to our national economies and the collective economy of Europe will become - with the growth of China and the continuing productivity growth of the US - even more intense in the decades to come.