Mike Milken: In the Future We’ll All Be Chinese

Michael Milken, the controversial financier and philanthropist, said China will overtake the U.S. economically this century, though for now the U.S. should concentrate on Mexico.

``Our projections show the United States will be the world's second-largest economy and India will be the third,'' some time this century, said Milken, chairman of the Milken Institute, an economic research group in Santa Monica, California.

`The most important country in the short run to the United States, however, is Mexico,'' Milken, 60, said in an interview to be broadcast this weekend on ``Conversations With Judy Woodruff,'' a Bloomberg television program.

With ``maybe 40 million young people looking for jobs and opportunities, anything we could do to help the Mexican economy to grow will be fabulous for the United States, and we would have a great economic partner,'' said Milken.

Milken's roller-coaster life has taken him from high-flying financier and junk bond king in the 1980s to imprisonment for securities violations in the early 1990s. He's now a philanthropist focused on improving medical research and curing life-threatening diseases such as prostate cancer, which he was diagnosed with and treated for in 1993.

Milken said he wouldn't consider the U.S. losing economic preeminence to be a negative development. ``The growth of India and China will bode very well for the United States in its growth,'' he said. ``There are tremendous opportunities for growth throughout the world.''

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aet7nPFPv79s&refer=home