Fellow Financial Times columnist Niall Ferguson has received some fierce criticism for a piece he wrote in Newsweek, under the provocative headline: “Hit the road, Barack”.
Among various complaints, critics cried foul over a graph showing that the International Monetary Fund predicts that, on current trends, China will overtake the US to have the world’s largest economy in 2017.
They have a point. Nobody disputes this claim (in a chart headed “A nation losing ground”). But this event would be no indictment of US economic policy under President Obama, or his predecessors. China has four times the population of the US; parity would mean that Americans were still on average four times richer.