So the question now is how long and how deep the inevitable recession will be. Bear in mind that the Japanese and French economies were already shrinking in the last quarter, the British, Italian and German economies are certainly shrinking in this quarter, and the economies of the United States and Canada are at best stagnant.

So much for the G7 countries, which account for close to 60 percent of the Gross Domestic Product of planet Earth.

It gets worse. Russia, No. 8 of the Group of Eight, is reeling from the collapse of the oil price from $148 to $70. This has collapsed its stock market and left the highly leveraged oligarchs with a severe cash-flow problem, made worse by the fall in commodity prices for Russia's other exports like nickel, aluminum and precious metals.

It gets worse still. China is slowing very fast indeed. It emerged this week that more than half of China's toy exporters have ceased operations this year and that something like 20 million Chinese have lost their jobs in the past nine months. Iron ore imports are piling up at the ports as the Western export markets dry up. The cost of taking a 40-foot container from Shanghai to Rotterdam has collapsed from almost $3,000 to $900.

Still, China has the option of shifting resources to domestic consumption, which would be a very smart thing to do for an economy that spends almost half its GDP on investment and is starting to get ominously overbuilt.

There are not many other really big economies of more than $500 billion annual GDP, and most of them are facing trouble. Australia has a housing bubble problem, and demand is slowing for its raw materials exports, a problem that it shares with Brazil. The Spanish economy is already shrinking. Mexico depends on the U.S. export market, as do Taiwan and South Korea. Turkey depends on Europe and Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states are not going to haul in nearly as much money from their oil exports this year as they thought.

So the world is in for a prolonged slowdown. Of the Top 10 economies, it is possible to feel optimistic for only one. India is less directly connected to the world trading system than most and has a great deal of resilience in its domestic market and a vast appetite for infrastructure investment. Its low-cost service sector in information technology will remain popular among Western companies, and it has been finding serious offshore gas reserves, so India should do better than most.

But India accounts for only about 2 percent of global GDP and is in no position to act as a growth locomotive for the rest of the planet. India also is heading into an election season, which is likely to encourage imprudent economic policymaking as the parties try to bribe the voters, that inherent temptation of democratic systems.

There will be parts of the world that do very badly indeed, probably starting with those that rely on large remittances from its citizens working in richer countries abroad. This will hurt Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Philippines, Central America, North Africa and Eastern Europe.

Indeed, with Europe slowing fast and Russia sinking into real troubles, and several of its economies already over-indebted and with big exchange-rate problems, Eastern Europe could suffer a very sharp downturn.

Is there any shaft of light to pierce this gathering gloom? Maybe, from the unusual and unexpected quarter of the United States. Not only is it a country known for its economic resilience and the heroic efforts of its consumers to live above their means. Not only does it have lots of inbuilt balancers like federal government transfers of wealth between prosperous and troubled states, labor mobility and ease of new company formation, it is big enough that some region or some sector is always doing relatively well. And it was heartening that on the day that the stock market looked at its worst, the Google phone was launched and then Amazon showed good results.

Above all, it looks as if the United States is about to delight much of the world and impress itself by its own determination to turn the page on the Bush era and display its own daring and post-racial sensibility by electing Sen. Barack Obama to the White House. Barring extraordinary accidents, it seems most unlikely that Sen. John McCain can stop him now.

There could be few more dramatic symbols of change, of no more business as usual and of America's constant capability to surprise itself and the world than the election of Obama. The great economist Lord Keynes always stressed that one of the most potent if indefinable economic forces is the animal spirits of the saving and investing and consuming public. An Obama victory will do wonders for the animal spirits of the United States and much of the world besides. It also will see a great surge of long-overdue investment in U.S. infrastructure. We all could be surprised by the speed of an American recovery next year.

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