Somehow we've missed the sale of Jaguar and Land Rover to an Indian company. The Swedes would love to buy back Volvo from Ford, but they've been outbid so far by a Chinese company. Yes, Roger Pensky is buying Saturn from GM. But the people who work in the Spring Hill, Tennessee plant that made them had better start looking for work. GM will supply Penske with cars for two years. After that, Penske says, "We are going to be a sales, service, and marketing company, not an OEM [original equipment manufacturer]," he said. Eventually, Penske explained, he wants at least some Saturn vehicles to once again be manufactured in the U.S., though that may not be the case in the short run after the agreement with GM runs out. He's already lining up contracts with manufacturers in China, Belgium and elsewhere, to build his version of Saturns.

There's a reason why in a recent book, The Emerging Markets Century: How A New Breed of World-Class Companies is Overtaking the World, profiles the dramatic rise of 25 world-class emerging market multinationals. The author's criteria? Each company must be recognized as a global leader and have a global presence; it must be competitive not only in price but also in quality, technology design and management; and it can be benchmarked against the biggest and best in the world.

The list presented in the book shatters some myths. First, only a handful of the Top 25 rely on natural resources and cheap labor as a competitive edge. Second, the leading companies headquartered in Korea, Taiwan, China, India, Brazil, Mexico and Russia have leapfrogged their American counterparts in terms of technology and business practices. Third, top companies can be found not only in Asia (14), but also in Latin America (10) and South Africa (1).

Yes, you read that right, folks...not one single company that this author expects to be one of the top 25 multinationals in the future is from the United States! If anyone doesn't believe that we're living through the decline of a great country and a great economy, we'd better pay a lot more attention to what's happening than we have heretofore. I surely hope I'm wrong, but we seem to be becoming a country that employs it's people working in government, inventing video games or social networking websites, or starting up small entrepreneurial service businesses. If the products we buy and use need to be manufactured, that usually happens somewhere outside the U.S. That's not the definition of the dominant economy that we all grew up with.

To read the article on the top emerging multinationals, go to http://seekingalpha.com/article/2984...multinationals