At the same time, we and other industrial countries have benefited from growing markets for our exports, higher profits on our capital and lower prices for the wide variety of goods we import. When things are going well in an interlinked world, one country’s prosperity reinforces another’s.
The rapid growth of emerging market countries, especially in Asia, in the last couple of decades, led to greatly increased trade among them as well as with industrial countries. The self-reinforcing growth seemed so positive that investors began to view investing in emerging markets as not much more risky than investing in their own more familiar industrial country markets.