CBS: Coming Soon, A Post-American World

(CBS) Millions of us have been swept up in the color and drama of the Olympic Games. But the Beijing Stadium isn't the only arena for global competition. Now, after decades of dominance, will the U.S. soon be "passing the torch"? Here's Martha Teichner:
Consider the Olympic Games a giant exclamation point … a fanfare announcing a message from the Chinese. They're putting the world on notice, that they are players playing to win, and not just Olympic gold. They want you to know that China is a power to be reckoned with, and proud of it, that it's bearing down on the United States … fast. "The implications are that China will be the commercial leader of the world," Albert Keidel, an expert on China's economy, told Teichner. "It will also deserve and demand leadership in global institutions." Keidel is the author of a startling new study for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "China's Economic Rise: Fact And Fiction." "We can model the economy and show that by 2035, it will be as big, if not bigger than the United States' economy will be at that time, and by the middle of the century it will be twice the size of the U.S. economy at that time," Keidel said. "That's staggering," Teichner said. "That's conservative," Keidel said. In cased you missed that - within the next 50 years China's economy will double the size of the United States' economy.

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