2010 will be landmark year for Asian economic growth

This is Asia's year, proclaims Dave Carbon, managing director for economic and currency research at DBS, Singapore's top bank.

Over the past decade, professional analysts and amateur pundits have portended the rise of Asia relative to a plodding, if not declining, United States and Europe, and some have even argued that China's eventual pre-eminence is an almost teleological certainty its eclipse by the industrialised West merely a 400-year anomaly. Yet, fortunately for the Western pretenders, the time for relinquishing that transient economic power has seemed indeterminate not tomorrow, but, like death, at some time in the distant and then movable future.

Not any more, says Carbon -- that time is now. The tiger...