Quote Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger
For comparison purposes..


Country GDP/ Real Growth Rate/ Per Capita


European Union 11,650/ 2.4/ 26,900

China 7,262/ 9.1/ 5,600

United States 11,750/ 4.4/ 40,100

France 1,737/ 2.1/ 28,700

Germany 2,362/ 1.7/ 28,700

United Kingdom 1,782/ 3.2/ 29,600

Zimbabwe 24/ (-)8.2/ 1,900

Tuvalu 0.01/ 3/ 1,100

http://education.yahoo.com/reference...re/gdp/1a.html
Not directed at PJ but more venting into the general direction of sources on the internet:
Is it so difficult to present data in a less sloppy way? Am I blind or does the table lack any hint at what year the data is referring to?
If I look at wikipedia a real growth rate of 3.3% is listed for the US in 2006 and 2.9% for the EU.
The numbers apparently come from the Economist Intelligence Unit which gives the following 2007+2008 growth estimates/forecasts:

USA - 2007: 1.8%; 2008: 1.2%
EU - 2007: 2.7%; 2008: 2.4%

It should benoted though that I did not see at which specific date these forecasts were published (and I should also add that I had the pleasure to work with EIU commodity price forecasts, which were ... uhm ... not of the best quality to say the least).

On the overall issue - I think it is in the interest of the EU and the US to have exchange rates fluctuate within a certain bandwidth without any of the two currencies getting to stromg or two weak. Currently we seem to get to the end of such a band and it remains to be seen how healthy a further decline of the USD will be for the global economy.
Given the current structure of the global economy we should not be interested in healthy US and EU economies on either side of the pond and I am certainly not looking forward to a potential longer "decline" of the US economy (considering that estimating long-term trends has a lot of crystal-ball-reading anyway )