This should be obvious to most people, but its interesting to see it all spelled out in the MSM.

(Bloomberg) -- The world’s most affluent nations will take decades to work off the biggest buildup in debt since World War II. The political costs may be permanent, laid bare at this week’s Group of Eight summit of leading industrial powers.

Bank bailouts and recession-fighting measures will explode the debt of the advanced economies to at least 114 percent of gross domestic product in 2014, more than triple the 35 percent of the main emerging economies including China, the International Monetary Fund forecasts.

The run-up in debt has hastened a power shift that is sapping the industrial world’s authority to impose its economic doctrine, currency arrangements or greenhouse-gas reduction strategies. Even some G-8 officials acknowledge that the group has lost its grip amid the global recession they spawned.

The eight-nation forum that starts tomorrow in L’Aquila, Italy is “a lot less relevant given its makeup and given developments in the world,” French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde said July 5.
...
Reflecting the relative fortunes of the G-8 and emerging markets, developing nations’ share of worldwide stock-market capitalization has climbed to a record 24 percent from 15 percent at the start of 2007 as investors piled into the fastest-growing economies.

While the eight deliberate, leaders of five developing economies -- China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa -- hold a parallel summit nearby before the G-8 meeting.

Led by China, the emerging economies don’t share the “somber fiscal outlook” of the affluent world, the IMF says. The IMF says the debt won’t be repaid as quickly as after World War II, which ended with debt topping 250 percent of GDP in the U.K., 200 percent in Japan and 100 percent in the U.S.

We are seeing a paradigm shift away from Western Europe and North America, and to Asia.