Fareed Zakaria GPS – CNN 09-01-13 – Investa Asset Management LLC

Salient to Investors:

Fareed Zakaria writes:

The World Bank says that in 1981, nearly half of all world citizens were impoverished versus less than a fifth today. However 95 percent of the total global decline has to do with China, whose poor declined by nearly 680 million people in the last three decades.

In 1981, China accounted for 43 percent of the world’s poor, South Asia for 29 percent and sub-Saharan Africa for 11 percent. By 2010, China accounted for only 13 percent of the world’s poor, South Asia for 42 percent, and Sub-Saharan Africa for 34 percent.
In 1981, 429 million Indians lived in poverty, or 60 percent of the population. By 2010, this share had dropped to 33 percent yet the total number of Indians living in poverty was still around 400 million because India’s population had expanded by a half a billion.
India’s recent drop in economic growth is alarming because those most affected will be the poor. Change for Africa’s poor is still too slow – in sub-Saharan Africa, poverty rates slightly worsened in the 1980s and ’90s.
The path to poverty alleviation is capitalist-led growth.

Zbigniew Brzezinski said:

Obama’s handling of Syria over the last year has been a case study in how not to conduct foreign policy and will cast a long shadow on America’s role in the world.
The whole approach on Syria has been misconceived, but we are very heavily committed to act. Presidential leadership is at stake. American credibility’s at stake. The worst outcome would be now to act indecisively.
We end up not only taking sides in a civil war, but helping guys who in Afghanistan and Yemen we are actually trying to kill with drones.
We have to move towards a wider international effort to deal with the problem of Syria, including involving the Asian countries, which are so dependent on oil from this region, and engage the Russians, who may use this conflict, if it explodes, to undermine overall our position in the Middle East.
We are setting the precedent that the president cannot act militarily even in the terms of limited military missions.
In the end Russia does not want to be isolated as it is fearful of stability in the caucuses.

Richard Haas at the Council on Foreign Relations said:

It is important to strike Syria as we have raised questions about our reliability and predictability and do more to inflict real pain and cost on the Syrian government for using chemical weapons.
There are a lot of precedents here that are unfortunate for future Republican or Democratic presidents.

Nicholas Wapshott at Reuters said:

If the richest and most powerful country in the world forgoes the responsibility that goes with that wealth, then it will cede the ground to another country to start intervening or even worse to allow the whole world, which is shrinking, become a lawless place.
These issues are as profound as you can get in terms of the history of the world,