The shift in economic gravity to Asia from the West is surely the biggest structural change underway in the global economy today. This shift explains, more than anything else, how Asia's economies managed to fully recover pre-crisis output levels by August of 2009 with essentially no help from the US, where output only stopped falling in July. It also explains how GDP growth in Asia accelerated -- over a full four year period between mid-2004 and mid-2008 -- while US domestic demand growth, long held to be the driver of global growth, dropped like a rock.