Expert View: The rest of the world is not the 51st state

Remember nylons? No, not the wartime female legwear, but that 1980s trend among bankers to live and work in both New York and London. It now seems a bit passé. One steel-trader friend invited me to his housewarming last week - in Shanghai. He now commutes between there and New York and London and Bombay.

Remember nylons? No, not the wartime female legwear, but that 1980s trend among bankers to live and work in both New York and London. It now seems a bit passé. One steel-trader friend invited me to his housewarming last week - in Shanghai. He now commutes between there and New York and London and Bombay.

This trader's peripatetic existence is a reflection of the dominant theme in financial markets over the past decade: globalisation.

I have always had my suspicions about globalisation. I'm not convinced it's anything new at all. The world's economies became inextricably interlinked around 1600, and if you glance at the financial pages of a Sunday paper circa 1900 ,you will find the stock market report divided into "Argentines", "Canadians", "South Africans" etc. A portfolio at that time was far more diversified than the average British pension fund is now.

I suspect that globalisation is really just Americanisation, and the effect of the United States' economic imperialism. As some of the more arrogant members of the US administration are at last having their wings clipped, it is as well to remember that many of them belong to the bizarre "Society of the American Century". This group believes the 21st century is rightfully theirs, and the inherent superiority of all things American will reign supreme across the globe.

So it is not surprising that America's courts, tax system and accounting authorities act in a blatantly imperialistic manner. What is surprising is that we put up with it.

This Americanisation also permeated the way investors picked stocks, as globalisation became the market's buzz word. It changed the way professional investors did research: the old system of separate national desks was modified or swept away with, as we switched to the US-style of doing things. Global sector analysts became all-powerful. In trying to value Glaxo, we talk more about Glaxo vs Pfizer than about Glaxo vs BP.

Or rather, we did. I detect change afoot. Many clients and investors are beginning to wonder if we are quite as global as the experts tell us we are. Stocks are not behaving as they should do - that is, globally. The economic cycle is at different points in China, where an extraordinary boom is peaking, the US, where we are seeing a strong recovery, and continental Europe, where it's hard to tell that the recession is over.

But economic decoupling is not the only point. A lot has been going on to emphasise the importance of national differences. In some sectors, these have always prevailed - utilities and construction, for example. But many of the new, "global" sectors have not been behaving either.

Take the French government's intervention in the Sanofi bid - a fine example of old-fashioned dirigism which has driven global pharmaceutical analysts wild. Likewise, the airline sector may have underlying global demand trends but the Alitalia saga seemed very Italian with the government and the trade unions sorting things out. The Japanese banks remain an enigma that defies the hardest analysis. Most US analysts think they should have gone bust years ago.

Last week, world opinion questioned whether the Americans really do know best in their imperial ventures. Maybe it's time for markets to do the same.

christopher.walker@tiscali.co.uk