Karabell has a terrific post on “the familiar sloshing sound of easy money.”

Since the financial meltdown, it’s become conventional wisdom that prior to the crisis, the world was awash in too much easy money—and that now it doesn’t have enough. It’s a tidy thesis, widely accepted. It’s also wrong. What’s remarkable about our post-crisis reality isn’t that we’re not capital-starved; on the contrary, we’re still swimming in excess liquidity. During those months of panic, all that cash didn’t evaporate. A lot of it just got stashed on the sidelines. Now the global pool is growing again, and the next market bubbles are already popping up.

The end result will be new asset bubbles, only they’re more likely to occur in the big emerging markets.

In China, $1 trillion in new government lending has flowed into the real-estate and equity markets, as well as into the commodities needed for that country’s still strongly growing economy. This spending, in turn, has buoyed commodity-rich nations like the Gulf states, Brazil, and Russia. Given all that, it’s no surprise that the sovereign wealth funds of nations like Abu Dhabi and Kuwait are once again booming. In fact, the only thing that’s new in the global liquidity story is where the money is being held—increasingly, in the South and the East, which have done relatively well in the global crisis, rather than the West.

And so:

While the United States may remain subdued for some time, chastened by the meltdown and grappling with its diminished influence, the mood in the rest of the world is perking up. Whatever the state of the markets, America’s ego bubble has probably been deflated permanently. In places like China and Brazil, it has only just begun to grow.

I don’t always agree with Karabell’s take on China, but this is dead on.