Western economies are shrinking fast

A groundbreaking study shows the West has been losing its overwhelming economic clout, and the process is accelerating. It must deeply concern globalists because economic worries will soon overshadow their narrow political goals.

The shocking truth is that the West is losing its economic power, says analyst Jon Hellevig. “In a report of 2014, we compared the G7 countries with a group we arbitrary called Emerging 7, consisting of the then seven biggest non-G7 countries: China, India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, South Korea (on 2017 data, Turkey would be bigger than South Korea).”

The entire Western mainstream media has meanwhile been turned into a propaganda machine for the purpose of smearing their targets and brainwashing the Western populations to support every corporate-sponsored war and conflict. Flash points remain in North Korea, the South China Sea, the containment of Russia by means of a sanctions war and encirclement of the country by NATO and neo-fascist regimes, Iran, Turkey, Venezuela, together with current and ongoing trade wars.

Afghanistan is at a crux with more American troops being dispatched, and China’s role is in the balance, with North Korea resisting US threats. The greatest tax- and health-reform packages in years are now in the hands of a Congress hostile to Trump.

Some conservative pundits even believe there is a regime change operation going on in Washington itself, as the campaign to eventually to remove president Trump from office, gathers steam.

Hellevig says the E7 may not form a political or economic block, but illustrate the fall of the economic might of the G7 anyway. He says the G7 is no longer the “world’s seven most industrialized and advanced economies”.

“In 1990, they still were. That’s only less than 30 years ago. Back then, their combined economies were worth $14.4 trillion, being more than 6 times bigger than the E7, and amounting to a staggering 39 percent of the combined world GDP.

“In a stunning change of fortunes, already by 2013, the E7 had surpassed the G7. Just a few years later, by 2017 (IMF estimates), the E7 has with $47.5 trillion pulled way ahead of the failing G7, which was left with $37.8 trillion, or 30 percent of the world total.”

According to Hellevig, the trend is even more catastrophic for America’s allies as the share of the US of the G7 GDP is now 50 percent versus 41 percent in 1990.

President Putin said before the BRICS summit that Russia shared the BRICS countries’ concerns over the unfairness of the global financial and economic architecture, which does not give due regard to the growing weight of the emerging economies.

Russia is surrounded by friendly and increasingly prosperous neighbours, except to the West. The world’s fastest growing economies are all very close to Russia.

China has been the world’s fastest growing economy for decades, at 6.5 percent per annum, which equals about $1.5 trillion in absolute terms, meaning that every two years it delivers economic growth that equals the size of Britain’s total historically achieved GDP of $3 trillion.

In 2016, the world leader in economic growth was Iran, with a staggering 15.7 percent growth in the fourth quarter of 2017, according to www.tradingeconomics. Turkey grew at 5 percent in Q1/2017. Equally, Russia may also be able to tap into the fast growth of India with 6.1 percent in Q1 of this year and Iraq at 11 percent in last year’s final quarter.

Quantitative easing in the West by comparison has not delivered more than 1,5 percent in nominal growth, mostly lining the pockets of the elite one-percent.

Ahead of the BRICS summit, the president said that Russia’s initiative on anti-monopoly measures is aimed at creating effective mechanisms to encourage healthy competition. “The goal is to create a package of cooperation measures to work against the restrictive business practices of large multinational corporations and trans-border violations of competition rules,” he said.

Putin also spoke about the rise of artificial intelligence which will dominate the world, The Associated Press reported. Speaking Friday at a meeting with students, he said the development of AI raises “colossal opportunities and threats that are difficult to predict now”. He warned that “the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world.”

Putin added that “it would be strongly undesirable if someone wins a monopolist position” and said Russia would be ready to share its know-how in artificial intelligence with other nations. The 64-year old leader added that in the future wars are likely to be thought by artificially intelligent machines.

He predicted that future wars will be fought by drones, and “when one party’s drones are destroyed by drones of another, it will have no other choice but to surrender” at a meeting of students in Yaroslavl, Russia.

Major technology companies currently view the most valuable artificial intelligence as having unique high quality visual data, techcrunch.com reported.

“This battle will be won by owning the connected camera. The majority of the data our brains analyze is visual, and therefore the majority of the data needed for artificial intelligence to have human (or better than human) skills, will rely on the ability for computers to translate high quality visual data.”

Fei-Fei Li, Director of the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Lab and Chief Scientist AI/ML at Google Cloud says “More than 500 million years ago, vision became the primary driving force of evolution’s ‘big bang’, the Cambrian Explosion, which resulted in explosive speciation of the animal kingdom. 500 million years later, AI technology is at the verge of changing the landscape of how humans live, work, communicate and shape our environment.”

More than 80 percent of the web is data in (visual) pixel format. “There are more smartphones with cameras than the number of people on earth, and every device, every machine and every inch of our space is going to be powered by smart sensors,” says Fei-Fei.