It's a small world after all

I just read a New York Times article covering Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke's recent speech about globalization. It crystalized so much of what's going on today and helped me understand the context of debates over immigration, outsourcing, and even the slow decline of U.S. hegemony (yeah, we still rule the world for now, but it won't last forever). Even the Internet is not so important in itself--what makes it important is the way it ties the world together. And, of course, all this reminds me of the prophesy in Daniel 12 where it talks about people going here and there to increase knowledge before The End comes ... not to get too heavy on you guys or anything. ;-P

I'd be especially interested to know what Saur, my protectionist blogofriend (I just coined a word!), thinks of Bernanke's remarks.

Some excerpts:

“The emergence of China, India and the former communist-bloc countries implies that the greater part of the earth’s population is now engaged, at least potentially, in the global economy,” Mr. Bernanke said. “There are no historical antecedents for this development.”
...
One of the most startling changes, which has helped fuel American growth and keep interest rates low, is that the United States and other wealthy industrialized countries are attracting huge volumes of capital from poorer counties in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

“Today, the world’s largest economy, that of the United States, runs a current-account deficit, financed to a substantial extend by capital exports from emerging-market nations,” Mr. Bernanke noted.

Mr. Bernanke has previously argued that the United States’ huge indebtedness is merely the flip side of a “global savings glut,” caused by a shortage of investment opportunities in other countries.

Other analysts take a much darker view. Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard University, warned in a paper here that the United States is becoming dependent on developing countries’ excess savings — capital that they may soon start to use for themselves instead.
...
“The scale and pace of the current episode is unprecedented,” he said. The changes wrought by Columbus’s voyage to North America were hugely important, he noted, but they took centuries to occur. By contrast, he said, the emergence of China as an export powerhouse has altered the world in less than 30 years.
...
If Mr. Bernanke had a message to political leaders, it was that they needed to acknowledge the costs of globalization, in terms of lost jobs, disrupted livehoods and wrenching change and help their constituents come to terms with them.

“The challenge for policymakers is to ensure that the benefits of global economic integration are sufficiently wide-shared — for example, by helping displaced workers get the necessary training to take advantage of new opportunities — that a consensus for welfare-enhancing change can be obtained,” he said.