Global Econ Puzzle Awaits New President

Whether it's John McCain or Barack Obama, the next president will confront a global economic landscape unlike anything his predecessor confronted, write Robert Hormats and Jim O'Neill. In an op-ed for the Financial Times, the two Goldman Sachs executives explain that the new president's greatest challenge will be the rise of emerging economies, whose share of world GDP has doubled since George W. Bush took office.

The so-called BRICs—Brazil, Russia, India and China—hold the key to America's economic future, especially as the US's low savings rate and overreliance on credit force the nation to borrow heavily from the developing world. Now that "the world’s economies have reached a new level of interdependence," the next president will need to invest lots of capital, both political and economic, to keep the BRICs happy. (More Goldman Sachs stories.)